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.
Pond at the South Wellfleet Audubon, last week. This is really a dammed-up small stream, dammed by dirt farmers a century or two ago and not a natural pond. Wellfleet's natural ponds, large enough for sailing Sunfishes, are deep, clear kettle ponds which are eminently swimmable:
It turns out we are the ones who failed Him. We weren't prepared for a mega-dosage of awesomeness. We were too dimwitted to grasp the decency of central planning. And the insistence of troublemakers to engage in debate and vote, in fact, is the most serious threat to this nation's future.
As in the case of the pitiful Maureen Dowd. What asteroid does she live on? I don't have the time or the patience to point out every error of logic and fact in her piece. It is just mind-boggling. She needs to get out in the world a little.
Until marriage is restored as the norm for child-rearing in the inner city, black and Hispanic crime rates and education failure will continue to be disproportionate. No government program can possibly compensate for the absence of fathers in the home and the absence of the cultural expectation that men will be responsible for their children.
Also,
The mayor is eager to talk about marriage for gays and lesbians, but he cannot bring himself to use the word when it comes to black and Hispanic heterosexual couples. His initiative proposes to ensure that both parents are “fully engaged . . . even if they don’t live together.” But men who have fathered several children by several different women—the dominant pattern of inner-city “multipartner fertility” today—are unlikely to be able to engage “fully” with all their children, even if such out-of-home engagement were an adequate substitute for a married father in the home.
Bloomberg, Soros, et al are insane. That's not a diagnosis: it means that they are not in reality. I doubt that either of them have ever sat down and talked to a 16 year-old single high school drop-out mother of three who happily and willingly consigned herself and her kids to a life of dependency and dysfunction. Have a kid? Get your own apartment! And a check from the city! And free medical care and food stamps! Why not? Their moms did the same thing. Normalization of dysfunction and dependency.
The government incentives are perverse, and it's on our nickel.
I'm not an expert about the rioting and looting in England, but I take the reporting from there with a grain of salt. Why? Editors usually have a theme they impose upon stories. The scale of England's will require careful and honest examination.
Meanwhile, a New York Times reporter who covered the riot, violence and looting in Brooklyn's Crown Heights in 1991 just finally broke silence about the shoddy and misleading theme imposed by the NYT editors. It's worth reading: Telling It Like It Wasn't.
One of his best, I think. 1997, such a short time ago. Song brings tears to my eyes. Even if you aren't a fan, give this a try - do it for me, your Editor Dog in Chief:
Sue and Dan gave me permission to post this free ad for Aunt Sukie's, which is the extended BD family's favorite B&B in Wellfleet - or on the entire Cape, for that matter. My parents have stayed there, as have my son and his bride.
When the kids were young, we'd always rent a house (which permitted dogs) for a week or ten days - often large enough to accommodate friends and relatives too. Now, Mrs. BD and I often travel alone and, happily, we like to do exactly the same things (mostly). We don't need a whole house, and 4-5 days suffice for our annual doses of cold salt water swimming, fresh Wellfleet oysters, and touching base with our old haunts plus always adding one or two new ones. (Last year, we went twice to bracket our trip to Austria and Germany - and to drag Gwynnie and spouse up to the Cape).
Anyway, we love to stay at Aunt Sukie's. Why bother owning a place, when you can go where you want anytime and leave the worry and maintenance to others? (And I am always cognizant of Thoreau's admonition about the dangers of one's possessions owning you.) Besides the setting and their antique house with Sue's beautiful cottage gardens, Sue and Dan are truly gracious and enjoyable hosts. They have to be gracious to put up with a neanderthal right-wing nut like me.
One of the best things about Aunt Sukie's (named after Sue's great-great something aunt who once owned the house in 1830) are the guests you meet there at breakfast. I don't know how they get the guests they get, but they are blessed. Interesting, accomplished people from all over the world who aren't looking for a pretentious Four Seasons Resort with a heated swimming pool. The atmosphere is such that, after a breakfast or two together at the big table, you all tend to become instant temporary pals and are exchanging tips about how to spend the day energetically and fruitfully.
It's not fancy (small rooms, no Jacuzzis, etc); it's simple New England-style in the best sense. For those for whom it matters, they do have a Dartmouth College room available too in the old part of the place.
View from our bedroom deck towards your private beach, with Great Island in the background:
Isn't it time for the New York Times to run another 10,000 word essay about how any minute everyone is going to flee the suburbs and flock to the cities, because we all know the quality of life is so low out there in the sticks?
How do these people have any credibility? How do they get away with this? It’s mind boggling that its gotten to a point where the EPA is dictating policy based on what is an obvious fraud, or if you want to be gentle about it, creates enough doubt to back off.
This is looking like another ‘annus horribilis’ for Barack Obama, the ‘hope and change’ president who, on current trajectory, seems destined for failure, with a legacy of declining prosperity at home and dispiriting American weakness abroad.
It's sort of amusing to consider that these are the Riot Police we're watching scurry away like rabbits. One can only imagine what regular old bobbies would do in that situation -- after they wet themselves, I mean.
Lots of websites, this website included, post videos instructing you not to talk to the police. Everyone runs into the street with a video camera, traffic stop and armed robbery alike, trying to catch a YouTube-able Rodney King moment to get their fifteen minutes of Internet fame by proxy. No one has to do that in England, there's a camera everywhere already.
This is what you get when the police know there's nothing but trouble in it for them to protect your homes and businesses, and ultimately, your lives. God help you if you don't sort your recyclables, though.
Back from the Cape, where it's low 60s at night and high 70s during the day. North Atlantic weather. Ocean water low 60s, Cape Cod Bay water low 70s. Harbor water a tad warmer. We find it refreshing. Expect cold rain and fog every few days. Ate lots of Cod and Wellfleet oysters, of course - although Mrs. BD did sin against the Seafood Law with one fat burger with bacon and blue cheese. I declined to turn her in to the food police. We did manage to walk at least 3 hrs/day.
One of these days, I'll do a post about why I love semi-shabby and small-d democratic (also large D, however - Obamaland) Wellfleet so much, as compared to prosperous, well-groomed and preppy Chatham, or Eastham (comfortably rustic once you get off Rte. 6, but lacking a village), or rural Truro (also lacking a village), or any of the fully-developed, suburban-feeling mid-Cape towns. Until I do that, I'll just post my snapshots, as usual, and let them speak for themselves. 70% of Wellfleet is national parkland.
Duck Harbor, Wellfleet, last week, early morning. Dogs allowed, beer and tobacco allowed - but you cannot go without a town beach sticker. No lifeguards, of course: swim at your own risk pretty much everywhere, like the old days.
(Yes, my horizons always tilt to the right. I think it's a Learning Disability, or maybe my politics. So sue me.)
This spring marks the fortieth anniversary of that climacteric of cultural catastrophe, 1968, when for a moment the forces of anarchy and malignant sentimentality seemed poised to overrun the bulwarks of civilization in the West. We are pleased to publish in this issue The Sixties at 40, an important reflection on that critical moment by Peter Collier, who lived through les venements as a participant observer. The spirit of the Sixties, Collier suggests, didn't die, exactly; rather, it's been absorbed as a sort of toxic parody: a fate worse than death as its anarchic brio dissolves into a glutinous mixture of revisionism, political correctness, multicultural cliches, and progressivism.
It gets better:
You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how creative, idealistic, and loving it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. In fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the herd of independent minds. Its so-called creativity consisted of continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for love was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence. What Allan Bloom said in comparing American universities in the 1950s to those of the 1960s can easily be generalized to apply to the culture as a whole: The fifties, Bloom wrote, were one of the great periods of the American university, which had recently benefitted from an enlivening infusion of European talent and were steeped in the general vision of humane education inspired by Kant and Goethe. The Sixties, by contrast,
were the period of dogmatic answers and trivial tracts. Not a single book of lasting importance was produced in or around the movement. It was all Norman O. Brown and Charles Reich. This was when the real conformism hit the universities, when opinions about everything from God to the movies became absolutely predictable.
Knights, Jerusalem, the Seljuk Turks - the history of the Crusades and the future of Islam, by Rubinstein in The New English Review. One quote:
The knights who entered combat against Muslims and pagans did so for Christian objectives. This led to a radical change in Christian thinking about war. Before the Crusades, the Church was ambivalent about killing and wounding in war. St. Augustine helped to formulate the idea of a “just war" by arguing that killing carried out in obedience to divine command or legitimate public authority did not violate the commandment "Thou shalt not kill."[14] Nevertheless, even a “just war” did not receive the Church’s wholehearted approval. A war that the Church promoted and blessed, such as the First Crusade, had been unthinkable.
Pope Gregory VII (1073-85). was the prelate most responsible for the Church’s changed attitude towards war.[15] One of his favorite quotations from Scripture was “Cursed be he who keepeth back his sword from blood.” (Jeremiah 48:10).[16] Gregory proclaimed a new type of Christian soldier-saint.[17] Before Gregory, Saint George and Saint Sebastian had become saints in spite of having been soldiers. As a result of his teachings, men became saints because they had been soldiers. The long-range consequences of this transformation remain with us to this day.
I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time - waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God - it changes me.
Bird Dog is returning from a brief vacation, and asked me to do today’s morning links. I’ve mostly been on a staycation the past month (actually, better than that; wife and sons off in Europe visiting family; P-A-R-T-Y!), so I’ve been spending relatively little time following the news and blogs. If one skips the newspaper for days or weeks, it’s largely true that only the names and the dates change. The stories are much the same. But, current events and developments taken together are some of the most negative for the US that I’ve experienced in my 63-years, about 50 of which I’ve closely followed the happenings. As President Obama’s former chair of his Council of Economic Advisors admits, we're "pretty darn f—ked." -– Met up with a Black guy, Rich, who went through Parris Island same time I did. Both still USMC green, not Black or White. He’s now retired from the Corps. He from poverty in No. Carolina, me from NYC. Agreed that following our grandparents’ rule to be frugal and save, don’t gamble, and keep moving forward is best advice we ever received and what we try to pass on to our children.
...why do women work fewer hours, choose less demanding jobs, and then earn less than men do? The answer is obvious: kids. A number of researchers have found that if you consider only childless women, the wage gap disappears. June O’Neill, an economist who has probably studied wage gaps as much as anyone alive, has found that single, childless women make about 8 percent more than single, childless men do (though the advantage vanishes when you factor in education). Using Census Bureau data of pay levels in 147 of the nation’s 150 largest cities, the research firm Reach Advisors recently showed that single, childless working women under 30 earned 8 percent more than their male counterparts did.
This did apply to me:
It makes no sense to think of either the mommy track or the resulting wage differential as an injustice to women. Less time at work, whether in the form of part-time jobs or fewer full-time hours, is what many women want and what those who can afford it tend to choose. Feminists can object till the Singularity arrives that women are “socialized” to think that they have to be the primary parent. But after decades of feminism and Nordic engineering, the continuing female tropism toward shorter work hours suggests that that view is either false or irrelevant. Even the determined Swedes haven’t been able to get women to stick around the office.
40% of American college admits require some remedial education. I am not surprised. It's not to blame the secondary schools. It's just that we have people going to college who aren't college material - at least not yet.
The fact is that higher education is a booming industry in America, subsidized and supported by countless state and federal programs. Many of these schools are desperate for warm, paying bodies to fill their seats. Anybody can get into some college today, and they will do their darndest to keep him there because lower-tier schools need the income to survive (and need to report decent graduation rates).
We have become a nation of degree mills producing meaningless pieces of very expensive paper. I have interviewed many such people from lower tier schools and can report that they should not have bothered. They had the illusion that we might pay them more to do a clerical job if they had that degree from Eastern CT State College. Surprise, surprise - they can't do algebra, compose a literate and grammatical business letter, or get their minds around an abstract concept.
Who is the bigger sucker: Me, whose taxes subsidize the school? Or them, for wasting years when they could have been doing or learning something useful?
John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate set off a fiercely contemptuous reaction. The chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party said Mrs. Palin's sole qualification for high office was that she had never had an abortion. The comedian Bill Maher scoffed at the idea that "this stewardess" would be first in the line of succession. The scorn moved The Atlantic Monthly's Clive Crook to write that "the metropolitan liberal, in my experience, regards overt religious identity as vulgar, and evangelical Christianity as an infallible marker of mental retardation. Flag-waving patriotism is seen as a joke and an embarrassment."
The denunciation of Palin took place 45 years after William F. Buckley Jr. wrote: "I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University." From Richard Nixon's invoking the "silent majority" to Mrs. Palin's campaigning as a devout, plainspoken hockey mom, conservatives have claimed that they share the common sense of the common man. Liberals from Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama to innumerable writers, artists and academics have often been willing foils in this drama, unable to stop themselves from disparaging the very people whose votes are indispensable to the liberal cause. The elephant-in-the-room irony is that the liberal cause is supposed to be about improving the prospects and economic security of ordinary Americans, whose beliefs and intelligence liberals so often enjoy deriding.
Buckley's identification of the political fault line running beneath the campus quadrangle was confirmed by "UD," a blogger for "Inside Higher Ed." Belittling Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho, UD concluded, "A lot of Americans don't seem to like highly educated people, and they don't want them running the country." He continued:
We need to encourage everyone to be in college for as many years as they possibly can, in the hope that somewhere along the line they might get some exposure to the world outside their town, and to moral ideas not exclusively derived from their parents' religion. If they don't get this in college, they're not going to get it anywhere else.
Thus, higher education is remedial education, and the affliction it remedies is an American upbringing.
Read the whole thing (link above). Voegli captures one of those things that bugs the heck out of me. But I am "mentally retarded," so I guess my view doesn't count. We aren't opposed to "higher ed." However, we believe in common sense, and we believe that the intelligent will and do educate themselves, and that the foolish will remain foolish with their degrees. Especially nowadays, with our degraded standards and expectations (examples - it is possible to graduate from college in the US today without ever taking any calculus, physics, statistics, economics, or American History).
For the blank youth in a land without history, there is no past except as a scrambled mess of tropes, images and symbols to be combined and recombined in the way that amuses them best. There is only the wide open future. A future that is at once hopeful and hopeless. Ahead revolutions beckon. Each revolution excites them, and then fails, hardening them. They are told over and over again that the future belongs to them. But at some point they are forced to realize that in truth nothing belongs to them. Not the past. Not the present. And most certainly not the future.
"Maybe nothing is really bad, since I am convinced that we will win the future."
Abbie Hoffman
Historical inevitability. The conviction that WE WILL WIN THE FUTURE. It makes the difference between victory and defeat. An advancing army is worth far more than a retreating army of twice its size. The difference is in morale. In expectation. A retreating army expects to be beaten. An advancing army expects to win.
Map that analogy onto countries and ideologies. Consider how conservative political parties act in almost every country. As if they expect to be beaten. They expect it because they lost that sense of historical inevitability. The Goldwater campaign challenged Democratic voting blocs with, "In your heart you know he's right". Today most conservative parties 'know' in their hearts that the left is right. They quibble with their tactics and nitpick the implementation, but they have come to agree on the basic ideas.
In the US and the UK, the Republicans and the Tories are willing to agree to every one of the left's cultural agendas, as long as they're allowed to make some cuts in the budget. In Israel, Netanyahu is doing a fantastic job on the economy, while arguing that he should be allowed to carve up Israel on the installment plan, not in one lump sum. Imagine if after the Battle of Saratoga, the American colonies had agreed to go back under King George III's rule, as long as George Washington was made Finance Minister with the authority to review the books. We won't need to worry about the cultural war or restoring some sense of purpose to the nation, once we've trimmed 11 percent off the expendables budget.
This is the species of absurd madness we are dealing with here-- because even when they win elections, conservative parties act like losers, determined to prove that they aren't the bad guys. That they are tolerant, decent and generous. Good losers in short.
James Wood: 
‘Is Marriage for White People?’
Knights, Jerusalem, the Seljuk Turks - the history of the Crusades and the future of Islam, by Rubinstein in 
From the I wish I had Written This Department: Voegli's 
