Maggie's Farm

Saw the Screwtape Letters today, a 90-minute off-broadway monologue by the subtle and crafty devil Screwtape which includes most of the memorable parts of CS Lewis' book. It is performed, appropriately, in Hell's Kitchen - in Saint Clement's Church.

Hell's Kitchen has come a long way over the past 20 years - what a hopping area which used to be creepy, dark, and semi-abandoned. I'd live there now in a flash. We had an excellent Turkish meal down there at Turkish Cuisine, with decent Turkish wines and Turkish dark beer. I am a big fan of the Turks and of their food - and that yogurt-mint sauce they make which is good on grilled lamb and everything else. It's not too easy to find good Turkish restaurants.

We took a nice stroll through the theater district to get over to the church/theater. On the cross-town shuttle from Grand Central, we met a group of 20 good gals from Ohio who came to NYC on a bus for a two-day shopping spree. They were all carrying these gigantic black vinyl shopping bags they found in Chinatown.

Article the Eleventh: The enumeration, in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Article the Twelfth: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved by the States respectively, or to the people.

I enjoy reviewing quaint, obsolete documents like the Bill of Rights. The online, handy source for the 100 most important documents of the Republic: Click here: Our Documents - Home 

The fact that something is measurable does not render it meaningful, and not everything that is meaningful is measurable.

From a piece by The Barrister of Maggie's Farm

Blacks in the top chairs. Tiger. No longer golfer Stan O'Neil, however: Merrill may have pooped in its pants.

Everybody jokes about Moslem men preferring goats and camels, but they are being distracted by human females too.

The China Connection continues to get weird for the Clintons. Surber. Is this Human smugglers for Hillary? And is she hiding behind her genitalia?

Elitists are the true parasites. h/t Thompson's Ephemera

Were US aircraft participants in the Syria attack? J. Post

A good deal for crims in Philly. Classical.

Blame Bush for jobs. Attack

Death factories? And Rightly So. Straight out of Brave New World.

Supermice. BBC Science News

A $400 mini-laptop

Why driver's licences for illegals is a terrible idea. Betsy

More details on the Harvard media bias report. Cap'n Ed

Photo: A house in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom

Too bad the tape is cut a bit short.

Hillary's "grim polka." Noonan. A quote:

...the larger point is that her policy approach revealed all the impulses not of the New Centrism but the Old Leftism. Her statements were redolent of the 1990s phrase "command and control." They reflect a bias toward the old tax-raising on people who aren't rich, who aren't protected, the old "my friends and I know best, and we'll fill you dullards in on the details later." 

Soldiers bust up anti-Chavez demonstrations.

Is there any relationship between diet and cancer? No, None. (h/t, Junk Science)

School choice on the Utah ballot.

Is this Hillary sex story for real? Her "body person"? Or is it "fake but accurate"? Or is it dirty tricks?

I hope it's not true. I'd like to see primaries and elections on the issues, but I have learned, over time, that politics is warfare. The young lady mentioned is certainly a cutie-pie, and rumors of Hillary's proclivities go back to the Little Rock days. Everybody's heard them.

The NYT reports that:

The rescue of the Florida Everglades, the largest and most expensive environmental restoration project on the planet, is faltering.

Seven years into what was supposed to be a four-decade, $8 billion effort to reverse generations of destruction, federal financing has slowed to a trickle. Projects are already years behind schedule. Thousands of acres of wetlands and wildlife habitat continue to disappear, paved by developers or blasted by rock miners to feed the hungry construction industry.

The idea that the federal government could summon the will and money to restore the subtle, sodden grandeur of the so-called River of Grass is disappearing, too.

Instead of complaining about the federal government's stinginess, why not consider what more Florida can do now, if not to restore the entire ecosystem, to stop the development of a habitat and a hunk of land that most Americans agree is worth protecting as a precious piece of our national inheritance.

Photo: NYT photo of the Everglades in Palm Beach County

You can tell because idiot, self-hating dhimmis like this start speaking up. h/t, Theo

Blog power? U of Delaware drops thought-reform program

Also, Nobel winner refuses prize: denounces global warming hoax

The leftist tilt of the major American newspapers, from Will:

 Read his whole piece, with more of his typically-informative charts, at Willisms.

From Roger Simon's piece on the Dem debate:

Hillary Clinton does not say what she means or mean what she says.

There is an Ends Justify the Means mentality and ultimately, I suspect, the Ends are Me Me Me even more than they are Socialism. Sounding virtuous about wanting to hand out other peoples' hard-earned money is just her chosen tool, while she hangs out with, and collects $ from, all of her billionaire friends. But she cannot finesse things the way Slick Willie can.

"Happy Halloween, you bunch of freaks." Sippican. Final quote:

While they sleep the deep, comforting sleep of the weary and contented child, I will steal their candy.

As for me, for once I think I will take my everyday mask off my face tonight, and go trick-or-treating for cold beers.

From a student "training" document at the University of Delaware, as quoted in a piece at Thompson:

... “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”

I guess that means that my skin tone determines my character and my moral fate. That sounds a teeny bit racist to me.

Photo: A typical "white people" cocktail party last week in leafy, sophisticated Wellesley, MA

Feldman at American Thinker, quoting a piece by Poe:

In it, Hillary declared, "We are... putting together a network in the blogosphere". She attributed its success to the efforts of "institutions that I helped to start and support like Media Matters and Center for American Progress..."

With these words, Hillary confessed to a federal crime. Both groups are supposedly "non-partisan", 501(c)3 tax-free organizations, strictly prohibited from coordinating efforts with a national political candidate such as Hillary.

The Feldman piece here. The Poe piece here. (thanks, H)

I hate the use of the word 'public' as a synonym for 'government'. The government is the government and the public is what is not the government.

As quoted from Leon Louw at Samizdata

Americans are largely satisfied and optimistic about their personal lives, but pessimistic about their public institutions, says David Brooks in a NYT opinion.

I am not sure that is necessarily a bad thing. A quote:

Sixty-eight percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. Sixty-two percent think that when government runs something, it is usually inefficient and wasteful. Sixty percent think the next generation will be worse off than the current one. Americans today are more pessimistic about government’s ability to solve problems than they were in 1974 at the height of Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War.

This happiness gap between the private and the public creates a treacherous political vortex. On the one hand, it means voters are desperate for change. On the other hand, they don’t want a change that will upset the lives they have built for themselves.

I have no doubt that the relentless negativity of the media contributes to that, but it still sounds like the America I know and love - people running their own lives as they see fit, and grumbling and suspicious about politics and the gummint.

What would make me worry would be people loving their so-called public institutions.

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian "conception" of God. 45

Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything they say, and so everything can remain as it was before. "All for sin could not atone." Well, then, let the Christian live like the rest of the world, let him model himself on the world’s standards in every sphere of life, and not presumptuously aspire to live a different life under grace from his old life under sin. That was the heresy of the enthusiasts, the Anabaptists and their kind…. 46

From The Cost of Discipleship. (Thanks, Dr. Bob, for the reminder)

From People's Cube: