Sunday, November 14. 2010
A fellow hunter at the lodge this weekend had his Spinone with him. (Pic of his pup below) This was a new breed to me. A pointer. They seem to run 70-80 lbs. His owner says that if you want one, make sure you buy it in Italy, not in the US. Relatively slow, methodical, and errorless hunters, it seems, with a style which sounds similar to that of the Munsterlanders: they do not run crazy, but search carefully and relentlessly, at a steady human pace.
It's all in the genes. (You would like this dog, Craig.)
His dog was very well-trained (in Italian commands, eg "Posto!"). He told me that they say in Italy that the face of a Spinone should look like an old philosopher. His dog had that look, and insisted on slobbering me with drooling kisses - perceiving, as any wise philosopher dog would, that Bird Dog is a dog guy.
The breed is said to be an ancestor of all of the pointers, with a pedigree dating to c. 500 AD. The fur is thick and wiry.
I could use a spare Spinone around the place (although they look like tick magnets). A good excuse for another trip to Italia.
h/t, Theo
Isaiah 65:17-25
65:17 For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.
65:18 But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.
65:19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress.
65:20 No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
65:21 They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
65:22 They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
65:23 They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD-- and their descendants as well.
65:24 Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear.
65:25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent--its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the LORD.
No, it is not a Flying Fish.
Saturday, November 13. 2010
One quote from the interview:
One miserable November day I was down there on the sideline, wet, cold. And I looked up to the top of the stadium, and there was the press box. Shelter! I knew they had heaters in there with them, and these people were sitting there in complete comfort while we’re miserable down here on the field. They’re writing, they’re typing, and they’re warm. Then and there I decided to become a writer.
Is this image via Moonbattery fair, or just a cheap ad hominen shot along the lines of "Bush is retarded"? Name-calling.
As I understand it, "narcissism" covers a spectrum from wholesome self-respect (which must be earned), to dangerous sociopathy (manifested by an inability to care about, or even to deeply recognize, the existence of others except as tools).
The Wiki piece on Malignant Narcissism says this:
"The malignant narcissist is presented as pathologically grandiose, lacking in conscience and behavioral regulation with characteristic demonstrations of joyful cruelty and sadism."
That sounds pretty bad. To understand these things, one really needs to understand in detail how a person relates to others and what they mean to him. You can't do that by watching somebody on TV.
Here's a post on the topic: Narcissism in High-Functioning Individuals – Big Ego or Severe Disorder?
Sweeney Among The Nightingales
Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.
The circles of the stormy moon Slide westward toward the River Plate, Death and the Raven drift above And Sweeney guards the horned gate. Gloomy Orion and the Dog Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas; The person in the Spanish cape Tries to sit on Sweeney's knees Slips and pulls the table cloth Overturns a coffee-cup, Reorganized upon the floor She yawns and draws a stocking up; The silent man in mocha brown Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes; The waiter brings in oranges Bananas figs and hothouse grapes; The silent vertebrate in brown Contracts and concentrates, withdraws; Rachel née Rabinovitch Tears at the grapes with murderous paws; She and the lady in the cape Are suspect, thought to be in league; Therefore the man with heavy eyes Declines the gambit, shows fatigue, Leaves the room and reappears Outside the window, leaning in, Branches of wisteria Circumscribe a golden grin; The host with someone indistinct Converses at the door apart, The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart, And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud, And let their liquid droppings fall To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.
Friday, November 12. 2010
 I have never had bad grits, but some afficionados get fussy about their grits.
Come to think of it. friends gave us a big bag of stone ground grits a while ago. They were very good.
If people are doing better, increase taxes because they can afford it. If people are doing worse, raise taxes so as to be able to "help" them with more government spending.
Commenter John, here at Maggie's yesterday
Leaving this morning for an out-doorsy weekend. This pic made me notice how filthy my keyboard is. I need to run it through the dishwasher.
We discussed the rise of the black middle class earlier this week. Here's one piece on that. A quote:
Larry Tye helped answer an ages-old question: How did a high percentage of black people, who toiled as slaves and suffered under Jim Crow laws, shed that oppression to live middle-class lives and enjoy the American dream?
Telegraph: When people stop believing in God they start believing in Big Government and Obamaism
TIME: Happy Meal ban doesn't go far enough.
It's a wonder we can ever feed ourselves.
Driscoll: NYT Editor: Our Subscribers are Such Morons!
Not hot dogs for you.
This guy is an American hero
Everybody talks about the housing crash.
It has been no "crash." It's just the return from a bubble to the normal trend line.
Air power in Afghanistan.
Repub health care ideas are genocide
Another view of the deficit commission, from Mother Jones
More on those Russian spies
Map narrows for Obama reelection
VDH: The Obama Fabulists
Thursday, November 11. 2010
New York aristocrat Rosalie Edge was a crank, a Suffragette, and an ardent conservationist. A bio of her came out last year: Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy: The Activist Who Saved Nature from the Conservationists.
Among the many causes she took up, one was protection of raptors from the mass slaughter of her era. She bought Hawk Mountain in Eastern PA and created the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. A high point on the Eastern raptor migration flyway, Hawk Mountain had been a popular site for the slaughter of raptors by gunners who believed they were going some sort of good while having fun.
Hawk Mountain is now a foundation engaged in conservation education programs. It remains an excellent viewing spot in fall migration season. (Photo from the Hawk Mtn website.)
How tasty does this look? These are the $12 lunches at Republic on Union Square, NYC. We love Asian rice-noodle soups and dumpling soups at Maggie's. We like Union Square too. I could tell you stories about what it used to be like, back when I lived for a while on University Place in the Village (just across from Dylan's old hang-out, the Cedar Tavern). It was really bad. The cops would pull dead guys out of the bushes and off the benches when making their morning rounds. ODs, some stabbings too. That was back, before Giuliani, when the pundits said that NYC could not be governed.
You should see it now. A bar and cafe with live music in the small park, a dog park, great restaurants all around. Two off-Broadway theaters. Park guys picking up litter, and even an unobtrusive police presence - on foot. Not in patrol cars. Putting cops back on the neighborhood beat has worked very well in NYC. Patrol cars should be only for back-up and rapid-response, in urban areas.
 Triceratops never existed
CATO: Fixing Transit: The Case for Privatization
Olasky: What's healthcare like for the poor?
NRO: Best Presidential biographies
Deficit panel's Rx: 'Cancer' surgeryBudget scalpel draws blood, howls
Is this bipartisan thing DOA?
Hugh Hewitt: No more time for California dreamin'
Pajamas: Back to the Future with Jerry Brown at the Helm in California
Jeffrey Lord: Mark Levin's book changed America
Is Mark Levin our Tom Paine?
Connecticut Residents Are Tops in Well-Being
Amusing football trick play
Bob Kerrey: Obama is so Incompetent He Needs Someone to Do His Job for Him
From CVS, of course
BAD NEWS: ‘Jaw-Dropping’ Data on Black Male Student Achievement. “According to the report, poverty levels are only part of the equation because poor white boys (defined by eligibility for subsidized school lunches) are doing as well as black boys who do not live in poverty.” It’s about the culture.
France is a dying nation
Irony: AARP blames ObamaCare for increased cost of employee health coverage
...an essential feature of successful presidents is that they find ways to broaden their coalitions. Doing the opposite—pursuing policies which shed support, but keep just enough of it to maintain a majority—is a very difficult needle to thread.
That's civil war.
Calvin Coolidge once said, "The chief business of the American people is business." The Democrats just lost America because they forgot that.
On second thought, you can't forget what you never knew. The Democrats running things the past two years proved they have no clue about the business of business. In their world, the real world of the private economy is an abstraction, a political figment.
Wednesday, November 10. 2010
From Dan Gardner's So is the world predictable or not? The environmentalists' contradiction:
I recently wrote a book called Future Babble (to be released Oct. 12), which is about expert predictions, why they fail, and why we believe them anyway. The experience of sifting through heaps and heaps of failed predictions has made me quite sympathetic to Suzuki's first theme of humility. We truly are awful at foreseeing what is to come. And there's little reason to think we'll get much better. Indeed, key properties of complex systems make prediction inherently impractical or even impossible. We really should be humble. And cautious.
But how can a humble and cautious man say we are "past the 59th minute"?
In a review of Gardner's new book, Steven Pinker says:
“It’s rare for a book on public affairs to say something genuinely new, but Future Babble is genuinely arresting, and should be required reading for journalists, politicians, academics, and anyone who listens to them. Mark my words: if Future Babble is widely read, then within 3.7 years the number of overconfident predictions by self-anointed experts talking through their hats will decline by 46.2%, and the world will become no less than 32.1% wiser.”
– Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought
I forget which rural burg in Ohio had this sign up. Near Rte. 62, obviously. I'd worry that the soup might have some salt in it. Salt is bad for you, right?
Tuesday, November 9. 2010
 Yesterday was a good day to pull some favorite field guns - bird and duck guns -�out of ye olde gunne closet for a little pre-season cleaning, check-up, and oiling. That .22? Haven't used it in years so I grabbed it too for a little maintenance. The old single-shot 12 ga. is for the little one to practice with. There was some new rust on the barrel of the beat-up Mossberg pump I use for sleet and mud and salt-water duck hunting, but a little surface rust doesn't bother me.
It's a good thing I checked things over, because I discovered that I have lost the choke tubes for my Beretta semi-auto and for my Browning o/u with the gold engraving that I use mostly for clays. The tubes are nowhere. I think I left them somewhere last year, probably on some hunting club's gun bench when I was changing chokes. This means a costly visit to Briley's website because these guns now all have skeet chokes in them, and I like a little more flexibility. For example, a light-modified choke for ducks (which shoots steel shot like modified - but I am giving up on steel, mostly, except maybe for large flocks of Snow Geese, which, as they say, "go down like a prom dress.").
Not that it really matters - I can't hardly hit anything anyway since I injured my shoulder a couple of years ago.
I store guns in these silicone-impregnated gun socks, always with the barrel down so any loose oil doesn't leak into the wood and weaken it.
 “America demonstrates invincibly one thing that I had doubted up to now: that the middle classes can govern a state…despite their small passions, their incomplete education, their vulgar habits, they can obviously provide a practical sort of intelligence and that turns out to be enough.”
Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, via this new site.
That's a perfect description of us Maggie's Farmers. This French aristocrat understood America better than most of our own elites and pundits do today. de Toqueville came to love the idea of America - and Americans (despite - or because of - our not being French aristocrats).
 How to tell if Al Qaida has sewn a bomb inside your dog.
Is pain "God's megaphone"?
I hope not...
Is Economics a Science?
Economics and finance might be science, if it weren’t for people.
Right and wrong types of Hispanics.
For the Dems, the right sort are those who seek dependency and entitlement.
He hails from where the civil war began, but this black republican tea party favorite doesn’t want to be a leader on race.
This narcissitic absurdity mocks the very serious, necessary, and important work of Gender Studies, Italian-American Studies, and Skinny Studies.
Make my day, Ted Rall. My life needs a little more violence these days.
As demonstrated by the legal battle blocking power lines to wind farms in Kansas, environmental groups are increasingly against all forms of energy production.
Monday, November 8. 2010
 All about Rubio, at Weekly Std.
Move over, Sarah. This guy's the next big target.
Dino: ...the Chinese have been laughing at this administration for quite a while now
Am Thinker: Time to Tackle Right to Work
A little credit to the RNC
They did very well.
Fun with bureaucracy: What It Takes To Build a House
Allen West:
"I plan on joining, I'm not gonna ask for permission or whatever, I'm gonna find out when they meet and I will be a member of the Congressional Black Caucus," West, one of two black Republicans elected to Congress last Tuesday, told WOR radio. "I meet all of the criteria, and it's so important that we break down this monolithic voice that continues to talk about victimization and dependency in the black community."
He will no doubt be welcomed with open arms.
Ilya on the constitutionality of Obamacare:
In his decision in the Michigan case, Judge Steeh argued that the mandate is constitutional under the Commerce Clause because deciding not to purchase health insurance is an "economic decision."
"Economic decisions," he reasoned, include decisions not to engage in economic activity. This approach would allow the Commerce Clause to cover virtually any choice of any kind. Any decision to do anything is necessarily a decision not to use the same time and effort to engage in "economic activity."
If I choose to spend an hour sleeping, I necessarily choose not to spend that time working or buying products. Under Judge Steeh's logic, the Commerce Clause authorizes Congress to force workers to get up earlier in the morning so that they would spend more time on the job.
At Moonbattery:
Opposition politician Julio Borges accused Chavez on Sunday of trampling private-property rights and steering Venezuela toward Cuba-style communism.
Borges told a news conference that Venezuelans don't want to live in "a country of slaves, where the government is the owner of everything and the people aren't owners of anything."
Good thing Borges isn't American; the media would denounce his views as extremist and call him a racist and a "teabagger."
Has Obama alienated almost everybody?
Driscoll points out that American whites have achieved the same levels of unwed motherhood that Moynihan was alarmed about in blacks
The U.S. as U.N. Punching Bag
Nobody loves or respects you just because you volunteer to receive abuse
My pal, recently of Israel, sends me this email:
The separation fence made a huge difference in civilian fatalities. A good example of when a government responds well to the fundamental safety of its citizens.
When I think about the fence and the screening of Arabs who want to enter Israel, it is a hardship. Just as trying to get onto a plane today is for so many people. It is a hardship precipitated by a small number of murderers that affects millions of innocent civilians. Same for trying to get into the US today: if you're an alien, the process is more difficult. (An Israeli friend described his "reception" in US recently. Very unpleasant. Yet, he does not hold it against the Americans.)
It is shortsighted to blame the government for doing somethings that protect its citizens (and adversely affects both foreigners and its citizens (Israeli citizens go through unpleasant, routine checks of car, body, etc... when entering any public hall or private facility).
The other side of this is how really effective this terrorist tactic is: make the lives of millions miserable with relatively little effort and cost.
Here's the chart of terror in Israel, before and after. - Fixed
Why are there are no "Men's Studies"? Because there's nothing much about the male brain to study except "Come naked, bring food."
Anon.
 Some climate scientists plan to go full-bore political.
That ain't science. That's politics. Idiots, too: who wouldn't enjoy some balmy weather in hunting season? It's sleeting here, this morning. More:
John Abraham panics, apparently he and the AGU are forming a “Climate rapid response team”
So maybe it's war, not politics.
Luntz: Republicans won the midterm elections. Now can they survive?
Doubt it. They're the Stupid Party.
Let Them Eat Biofuels: Enviros Largely Responsible for Worldwide Food Price Increases
Kill people. Gaia likes that. Gaia likes dead people.
Germany attacks US economic policy
Federal Government Fights Obesity, Pushes Cheese
That would be Government Cheese, I believe. I prefer the imported black market unpasteurized stuff, and not in moderation either.
72% OF BLACK BABIES BORN TO UNWED MOTHERS
That is very Progressive and Advanced. Moynihan was just too uptight and bourgeois.
Jacobson: Jewish voting is irrational.
No, it's Progressive and Advanced.
Matthews: Obama’s Travel Expense Questioned Because Of His Race
Obviously. They never would have questioned it with Bush...
The man who saved the whales. h/t, Coyote
Hint: It wasn't Jacques Cousteau. He just annoyed them.
Insty:
CHANGE: Janet Daley: The West is turning against big government – but what comes next? “So a generation after the collapse of totalitarian socialism, its democratic form is finally crumbling as well. And, oddly enough, the latter may take longer than the former to unravel.”
Via a Vanderleun post:
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