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.
Two weeks ago, my friend Gerald Robbins -- Turkey expert and Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute -- brought us his quick analysis of the results of the election in Turkey. FPRI asked him to enlarge upon it for FPRI's readers. There's much more interesting detail and discussion of prospects and difficulties for Turkey.
A fascinating addition is Robbins' raising the possibility of "a bold, controversial move" to resolve the "long-festering" and violent Kurd rebellion. "If Mr. Erdogan can skillfully manage the process, he’ll be remembered as the person who settled the Kurdish issue, Turkey’s most burdensome problem." That may, also, help him recover from his proven "inane" regional policy of a bridge among the Arab and Iranian Moslems that has come a cropper as evident with his "badly miscalculated" dealings with Syria. Erdogan would be seen more as a venturesome uniter rather than an opportunistic dreamer of semi-Ottoman fantasies.
Among the likely winners of the Republican race (yes, that excludes Sarah Palin and Rand Paul), none have yet come even close to sewing up the nomination for president. That’s a good thing.
I’m a firm believer in the worth of long campaign seasons. Democrat or Republican partisans alone are a minority of the electorate. The crucible requires potential candidates to demonstrate their ability to craft a national coalition of their political party that will reach beyond to enough leaners (otherwise often called Independents).
The long campaign crucible, also, demonstrates the potential candidates’ ability to present themself and to encourage positive feelings with articulate, persuasive, sound proposals, while avoiding seriously alienating leaners or committing major gaffes that raise crippling doubts among the open-minded (not just opponent scalphunters).
At this point, there’s enough good to say about the leading Republican contenders to believe they’d all make fine vice-presidents, but as yet none have earned the higher expectation.
All will be in good stead as a better alternative than President Obama. However, that is not enough, for me anyway.
Once these high-school graduates hold a diploma in their hands, however questionable their skill level, they are deemed college-ready. Since America has a college for everyone and the society is committed to mass education, students who can read at only a marginal level or who cannot solve quadratic equations are seated in institutions of higher learning. Surely something has to give. Invariably remediation must take place, but that is insufficient to deal with widespread incompetence. Obviously course content and requirements are modified. A physics instructor at the City University in New York told me recently it is impossible to teach real physics when your students are incapable of engaging eight-grade math.
My seven men must yearn to see some fine, strapping, young body-in-its-prime with some specific ailment to which they can apply something quickly sovereign, doctor and patient both ending up refreshed. But no, they face daily the procession of an ever older, more decrepit, more grotesque, unsavory parade of bodies-- of those who have lived too long.
Once the political power of the climate movement, aided by an indulgent and largely unquestioning press, had pushed the climate agenda into the realm of serious politics, failure was inevitable. The only question was whether the comprehensive green meltdown would occur before or after the movement achieved its core political goal of a comprehensive and binding global agreement on greenhouse gasses.
and
It is a waste of time to talk science with Al Gore. It is a waste of time to listen to him at all. That, apparently, is what the world at long last is beginning to understand. The policy makers and the heads of state who only two years ago were ready to follow Gore up the mountain have softly and quietly tuned him out.
These days, he can’t even get his picture on the cover of Rolling Stone.
As Mead points out, the entire enterprise was close to insane from the beginning, despite all of the money to be made from it.
Off topic: Mead, Steyn, and VDH are so hot these days that it is difficult not to simply link all of their stuff.
He looked me directly in the eye, with a cold blue eyed stare and said, “Young with a bit of life and not too wide in the back. Should be a sure footed mare that can move fast and smooth with rhythm, without being scared of every little thing.”
Whoa now, that was a different request; I started to ask him if he was referring to a woman or a horse, but you can’t count on everyone appreciating my sense of humor.
Dr. Thomas Sowell wrote about "seductive beliefs" in a two-part article (second part here). He touched on some of the incorrect beliefs guiding President Obama. In short, Obama is an ideologue, narrowly (and poorly) educated. As a result, he is ignorant in the ways of the world.
and
Instead of having a superior intellect, we likely have the most ignorant, ideological, brainwashed dupe this country has ever elected to high office. The man's intellectual development never progressed beyond the stage of all-night freshman bull sessions where all the world's problems were solved (with help from adequate amounts of beer of course).
Beer, or pot and coke. Whatever. True or not, I guess that piece counts as a rant.
That's the title of a fascinating essay by Aaron at FP. (link fixed). A quote:
... a moral resurrection was essential. This meant not merely an overhaul of the Soviet political and economic systems, not merely an upending of social norms, but a revolution on the individual level: a change in the personal character of the Russian subject. As Mikhail Antonov declared in a seminal 1987 essay, "So What Is Happening to Us?" in the magazine Oktyabr, the people had to be "saved" -- not from external dangers but "most of all from themselves, from the consequences of those demoralizing processes that kill the noblest human qualities." Saved how? By making the nascent liberalization fateful, irreversible -- not Khrushchev's short-lived "thaw," but a climate change. And what would guarantee this irreversibility? Above all, the appearance of a free man who would be "immune to the recurrences of spiritual slavery."The weekly magazine Ogoniok, a key publication of glasnost,wrote in February 1989 that only "man incapable of being a police informer, of betraying, and of lies, no matter in whose or what name, can save us from the re-emergence of a totalitarian state."
A rescue from the "spiritual slavery" of Socialism.
Way back in 1988, at the beginning of the climate crusade, Se. Wirth remarked "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing--in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." There, in one sentence, is a succinct display of the serial bad faith and will to power of modern environmentalism. Even if catastrophic global warming turns out to be correct, would you trust control of America's economy to people like Gore and Wirth? Neither would I.
It's been a bad month for the New York Times. The feeding frenzy it tried to stir up over Sarah Palin's e-mails left the sharks unfed. (Snip) But none of that will change the Times' behavior. The Times is preparing itself for a huge push to re-elect President Obama and will leave no story unpublished that could possibly help Obama or hurt his opponent, regardless of who it is.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MCCAIN, WE’D HAVE ONGOING WARS ALL OVER THE WORLD, AND FAT-CAT DONORS ENTERTAINED RIGHT IN THE WHITE HOUSE. And they were right!
So what is socialism? It is a sort of modern version of Louis XV’s “Après moi, le déluge” – an unsustainable Ponzi scheme in which elite overseers, for the duration of their own lives, enjoy power, influence, and gratuities by implementing a system that destroys the sort of wealth for others that they depend upon for themselves.
Once the individual develops a dependency on food stamps, free medical care, subsidized housing, all sorts of disability or unemployment compensation, education credits, grants, and zero-interest loans — the entire American version of the European socialist breadbasket — then expectations for far more always keep rising, with a commensurate plethora of new justifications, usually in the realm of someone else having more than the recipient, always unjustly so. The endangered aid recipient is always seen as being pushed off a cliff in a wheel chair — therefore, “they” can afford to give “me” more; things are not “fair”; there is no “equality.”
6:12 Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions.
6:13 No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness.
6:14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
6:15 What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!
6:16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?
6:17 But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted,
6:18 and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.
6:19 I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification.
6:20 When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.
6:21 So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death.
6:22 But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life.
6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The founders recognized that the political power of groups or factions would become largely the basis for rewards from the state. Thus, they deliberately sought to circumscribe spoils and rewards from government. The difficulty they anticipated in controlling factions was exacerbated by twentieth-century progressivism. In The Rise and Decline of Nations(1982), Mancur Olson shows that factions seek to redistribute rather than create wealth and, over time, impose social and economic rigidities and costs which cause nations to lose vitality and reduce their rate of economic growth. This is America’s early-twenty-first-century affliction, and government-controlled sustainable development would further amplify the role of politics and factions in redistributing scarcity rather than creating wealth. Olson further warned that factions drive political life away from considerations of widespread common interests and spur divisiveness that can even make societies ungovernable.
Our colleges and universities, and the teachers they have educated, have undermined the understanding of, and attitudes towards, Western and American systems of economics and governance, guiding students from public schooling onward to become true believers in the reverse metamorphosis of sustainability. The concept of sustainable development would repeat the historical errors and failures of socialism and communism in the name of protecting nature.
Can I say that Rush was right about all this, back in the 1980s? He saw the Left's need for a new meme, a new narrative. That's around the time when many of us Maggie's folks took the Conservationist path of stewardship instead of the Greenie path of hidden power agendas.
Finally watched Glengarry GlenRoss. Despite the cast and the fine acting especially by a wonderfully-obnoxious Jack Lemmon, I thought it was just OK, and that Office Space was a better movie with a similar theme.
In part, the thing is that in Glengarry, they are all sociopaths. In Office Space, they aren't. In any event, movies tend to bore me. I am more of a book guy, with only around 25% fiction lately. Daily life offers enough fiction despite my enormous appreciation for well-crafted sentences.
I like this guy's cooking method. And ditto to him re the ribeye - it's the best cut of a dead cow. Those thick Costco ribeyes are dynamite. Have to be rare, though. If I'm just making one, I do it on a max-heat cast iron pan on the stove, and open the door so the smoke can try to exit. Why bother with the grill for just one fairly small steak?
I like crust on the outside, raw in the middle. You can throw them in the pan frozen, and it's easy to get that result in 20 minutes but you might have to cover it for a few minutes.
Gin for the martini, not vodka - and three olives - not one. After all, that's your vegetable course.
It felt like it had been the longest week of my life. I was filling in at some big apartment complex while the building's handyman was on vacation, and I ran my tail off all week long fixing things. I came home that Friday and did something I'd never done before, and have never done since:
I flopped into my easy chair.
Normally, I plunk myself down in front of the computer and get caught up. But I was so beat that I just wanted to hit the La-Z-Boy and relax.
Out of boredom, I turned on the TV.
It was kind of a bizarre sight. On a completely empty highway, a white SUV was cruising down the fast lane going about 45 miles per hour, trailed by a zillion police cars. It eventually turned off and as it drove through the neighborhoods, people stood on the side of the street with signs reading "Go, OJ!", "We Believe In You!", "Run, OJ, Run!"
As I said, it was pretty bizarre.
And thus started a nine-month journey as I watched every word of testimony and every cable talk show that evening, VCR at the ready for overlapping shows. And yes, I was there, a few weeks after the trial ended, watching the final talk show on the trial's aftermath, and when they signed off, that was the last of the 'OJ Special' shows.
So I obviously consider myself something of an expert on the subject.
The other day there was an article on Hot Air claiming that OJ was going to 'fess up and admit to Oprah that he did, indeed, kill Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. It's probably a hoax, but we'll see.
You might agree with some of the comments:
The verdict had NOTHING to do with the murders. It was a racial vindication that a black man could kill two white people and get away with it if the jury was black. It’s called jury nullification and it’s happened many times throughout history. It doesn’t make it any less disgusting but it is a fact.
They didn’t believe he was innocent, they just refused to process the facts of the case. They went into this jury duty with a pre-determined outcome.
Stupid judge. Stupid, stupid, stupid jurors.
Wasn’t the composition of the jury all black females? Not that it would make any difference in their decision-making of course.
The jury was not all black. It was, however, all dumb. In fact, it was what they call a “downtown jury” meaning they are stupid and prosecutors are less likely to get convictions.
Actually, these people are as wrong as wrong can be.
‘Gunwalker’ Goes Pravda: White House Unleashes MSM - The Post prints an attack on Issa that no other paper saw fit to run: an anonymous hit job concocted by the Obama administration. And The Times finally talks Gunwalker ... by attacking the GOP. With a debunked lie.
The US Department of Agriculture no longer serves as a lifeline to millions of struggling homestead farmers. Instead, it is a vast, self-perpetuating postmodern bureaucracy with an amorphous budget of some $130 billion -- a sum far greater than the nation's net farm income this year. In fact, the more the Agriculture Department has pontificated about family farmers, the more they've vanished -- comprising now only about 1 percent of the American population.
See how the Orient Dew, Shed from the Bosom of the Morn Into the blowing Roses, Yet careless of its Mansion new; For the clear Region where 'twas born Round in its self incloses: And in its little Globes Extent, Frames as it can its native Element. How it the purple flow'r does slight, Scarce touching where it lyes, But gazing back upon the Skies, Shines with a mournful Light; Like its own Tear, Because so long divided from the Sphear. Restless it roules and unsecure, Trembling lest it grow impure: Till the warm Sun pitty it's Pain, And to the Skies exhale it back again.
So the Soul, that Drop, that Ray Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day, Could it within the humane flow'r be seen, Remembring still its former height, Shuns the sweat leaves and blossoms green; And, recollecting its own Light, Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express The greater Heaven in an Heaven less. In how coy a Figure wound, Every way it turns away: So the World excluding round, Yet receiving in the Day. Dark beneath, but bright above: Here disdaining, there in Love. How loose and easie hence to go: How girt and ready to ascend. Moving but on a point below, It all about does upwards bend. Such did the Manna's sacred Dew destil; White, and intire, though congeal'd and chill. Congeal'd on Earth: but does, dissolving, run Into the Glories of th' Almighty Sun.
From Mead's brilliant analysis of 
The 
Climate change! 
I remember it well.
Peter Falk
On A Drop Of Dew