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.
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.
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.)
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.
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).
One of Holmes' students, a young man named Clair Patterson, began a project in 1948 to determine the ultimate age of the Earth once and for all. The problem at this point was not with the dating method; the problem was finding the right thing to date. In order to have the final word on the matter, you needed to date the oldest rock on the planet. How would you know when you found it? Patterson found a way around this. Instead of dating something in the ground, he dated something from the sky—a meteorite.
We are trying, with no help and a lot of opposition, to produce decent, productive, ethical, moral, well-read, arithmetically capable, ambitious, vigorous, funny, kind, intellectually curious, self-regulating adults. And the only question anyone has for us is: how can we live with ourselves, knowing we're keeping our children from the wonders of attending the White Dwarf Star Academy.
Somehow we manage to bear up under the shame of it.
I haven't thought about this old-timey Yankee diner dessert for many years, but someone brought it up the other day, and I am now hungry for one.
As I recall, the last time I had a slice of one was at a diner with my grandfather. Cannot think about the pie without remembering that polo- and poker-playing, shootin', fishin' slacker gramps of mine, who preferred shopping for horses, and dealing in sailboats and Elco yachts (leaving his real business to others) to regular work - and who died way too young of a series of MIs, at 63.
Boston Cream Pie is Yankee-simple, unfashionable, unsophisticated, and darn tasty, and it's a cake, not a pie, with potent if short-lasting anti-depressant properties.
You can make it yourself if you can't find it in stores. Easy to do.
Unlike most of the world, I am not allowed to have the Process be the Product. At the end of the day there has to be something tangibly different with the world or we don't eat. Sometimes we don't eat anyway. Most of the world we inhabit now is all Process and no Product. What is Twitter, or Tumblr, or Facebook, or a million other things you could name that consist solely of: This is how I go, when I go like this.
The federal government thinks the process is the entire product. The public school system can produce only public school teachers. The EPA is now supposed to protect the air from humans. The Department of Energy doesn't make any, and would prefer you didn't as well --or else. Cities like Detroit are trying to exist with no population now. Search your mind. You'll have to search hard to find exceptions, not examples.
“Our country is founded on a sham: our forefathers were slave-owning rich white guys who wanted it their way. So when I see the American flag, I go, ‘Oh my God, you’re insulting me.’ That you can have a gay parade on Christopher Street in New York, with naked men and women on a float cheering, ‘We’re here, we’re queer!’ — that’s what makes my heart swell. Not the flag, but a gay naked man or woman burning the flag. I get choked up with pride.”
Janeane Garofolo, who not only knows no history but who also ignores the fact that the Founders made it possible for those disgusting Christopher St. displays to occur.If you can stand it, more ugly political quotes via Moonbattery
A mountain of Cape Cod steamer clams with garlic bread and a couple of beers will be my supper tonite. Any dessert would ruin the experience by erasing that clammy goodness. I always have a cup or two of the broth. Sometimes I eat the necks, sometimes I don't.
These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.
For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: They’ll have them on again soon enough. After all, they’ve gotten so much encouragement.
He’s out of bullets. He’s out of arrows. He’s looking for stones on the seashore. … There’s nothing left in the cupboard. He did a huge Keynesian gamble, and it failed.
Scroll down to our recent posts - our humble site hit it out of the park in the past 24 hrs during these summer doldrums (even tho we strive to always be interesting).
Do us a favor, if you haven't already done so: Give the folks you know a chance to learn about Maggie's. They might enjoy us.
After a nine year binge of borrowing and spending; euro members began defaulting. Early in the European Sovereign Debt Crisis; euro states announced agreements in principal to solve isolated cases of small countries experiencing “temporary setbacks” with short term loans. First Greece; then Ireland; then Portugal; then Spain; then Italy; and now virtually every euro member except Germany is experiencing rising financial stress. The euro-debt burdens are so onerous; defaulting nations have no capacity to ever pay back their bondholding banks; making their banks also insolvent.
The supposed euro benefits allowed Germany to lure its neighbors into debt traps. Defaulting euro-members could then chose to either; start a new currency and suffer the same brutal inflationary consequences as Germany’s Weimar Republic after World War One; or surrender to Germany as the only power in Europe with the economic size and financial wealth to stabilize the euro-system. In the end, bureaucrats from all seventeen euro-members nations agreed to give control of future bailouts to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), a secretive private bank managed and funded by Germany. The ESFS has authority to loan money and impose whatever financial conditions it would like on borrowers. Over the next two years ESFS will bailout Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and their banks. Austria; Belgium; and Italy will soon follow and France and her banks eventually flirt with insolvency. The European Sovereign Debt Crisis is over; Germany won.
Even this reasonable piece misses the real points: America has no permanent underclass, the poor in America are not poor by any world standards, bad choices result in bad results, and many people do not chose material gain as their life goal. I have talked to poor people, I know poor people.
Americans' political ideology at the midyear point of 2011 looks similar to 2009 and 2010, with 41% self-identifying as conservative, 36% as moderate, and 21% as liberal.
“Incidentally, nice bit of Orwellian doublethink to call the grass-roots, libertarian-oriented Tea Party ‘Totalitarian.’ This has to be the first ‘Totalitarian’ movement in the history of mankind that, if it gets everything it wants…will leave you the hell alone.”
“The Affordable Care Act helps stop health problems before they start,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in a statement. “These historic guidelines are based on science and existing literature and will help ensure women get the preventive health benefits they need.”
Photo is of a woman's hideous health problem, tragically not cured in time, for free, by modern science. It's sort-of like a tumor, I suppose, but a healthy one which has a strange way of popping out of a lady's hoo-ha when it grows too big.
‘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 
I haven't thought about this old-timey Yankee diner dessert for many years, but someone brought it up the other day, and I am now hungry for one. 
Gateway reminded me of this one: 
A mountain of Cape Cod steamer clams with garlic bread and a couple of beers will be my supper tonite. Any dessert would ruin the experience by erasing that clammy goodness. I always have a cup or two of the broth. Sometimes I eat the necks, sometimes I don't.
Scroll down to our recent posts - our humble site hit it out of the park in the past 24 hrs during these summer doldrums (even tho we strive to always be interesting). 
I thought it was a blessing and a gift from God - and I naively thought that medical insurance was meant to help cover costly diseases.