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.
Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Warren G. Harding, and Harvey Firestone, 1921. I wonder where that camp was. I bet one thing they chatted about was American prosperity.
Well, I think the Heller case sort of settled it. As I say, the only problem is criminals with illegal guns. America doesn't have too many guns, it has too many crims. When we figure out how to effectively control criminals and the violent insane...
Here's my proposal: First, the government removes all illegal weapons from all of the criminals and from the violent insane. This would require a major, nation-wide undertaking. Second step, as a sign of faith in their effort, the government removes all weapons from their own bodyguards and the bodyguards of the wealthy and celebs. Then we can talk about reasonable rules for civil society and for us ordinary, rule-following citizens. Historically, only aristocrats could be armed with swords or whatever. God forbid the humble, honest peasants like us have access to weapons too.
I saw at Drudge that WalMart is almost sold out of firearms this Christmas. Guys and gals both enjoy a fun new firearm to play with. So do kids. Many if not most American boys remember their first .22 under the Christmas tree. I sure do. My Dad, a US Army vet, university professor, opera- and ballet-lover, taught me everything about it, safety, assembly, cleaning, everything. Good stuff. The smell of that Hoppe's cleaning fluid always takes me back to the farm's kitchen table covered with newspaper with gun-oil stains, just like Proust's madeleine brought him back. I destroyed countless beer bottles and coke cans with that rifle.
He also got us a powerful clay target-thrower when we moved into shotguns. Since then, I have enjoyed the challenge of shotgunning more than rifles but I still have a few rifles in the closet. Not sure how many because we never use them. Farm tradition always had a loaded 12 ga. leaning against the kitchen wall like any other farm tool, and a loaded revolver in the kitchen drawer with the pliers and scissors and balls of string. Country-style, I guess. My Mom is/was a champion with skeet and trap, better than me because of her relaxed, serene focus.
I love hunting, but only hunters know that shooting guns is only a small part of it. That's why it's not called "shooting." Self-protection? I don't really need it now but we have had problems at the farm where, in a very isolated place far from government control, a firearm would be handy for justice purposes or to civilize an insane Black Bear.
Handguns? Well, I figger my concealed carry permit should be enough to deter bad guys because I have never actually carried except in the trunk of the car. Might be amusing for people to wear the carry permit on their Brooks Brothers sports jacket as a deterrent to trouble.
...can we say, hands on hearts, that the state is wise today to be unafraid of its people? Or, for that matter, that the people even want to be trusted, as opposed to being taken care of, by the state?
To understand the left's position on nearly any issue, imagine a 20th Century American and then take away accountability. Assume that the individual is helpless and stupid, has little to no control over his own behavior and is only responding to stimuli and functions in a purely reactive capacity. Then use that data to come up with a response to anything from kids getting fat to a football player shooting his wife to terrorists firing rockets at Israel. The only possible answer to reactive behavior is to find the thing being reacted to and condemn it.
If you want to fake being a member of the left on any topic and in any setting, master this simple phrase. "But we have to look at the root causes to see who is really responsible." Congratulations, you can now get by anywhere from Caracas to Brussels to Berkeley.
The cacophany from the gun nuts is getting intense these days, and very little of it makes logical sense to me. I spoke with a colleague gun nut this week who told me that she'd be afraid even to touch a gun. I promised to take her to the range to get over this phobia. Hoplophobia. Probably a mental illness. A firearm is just a pipe and a hammer.
People talk about "dangerous semi-automatic" firearms. What? A cowboy six-shooter is semi-automatic, and so are most duck-hunting shotguns. Automatic firearms are illegal for civilians in the US. I don't think they know what they are talking about. (My error - were illegal but are not now. Missed that change. Machine guns are illegal.)
Guns are dangerous? Gee wiz. Who knew? I thought large bottles of Coke and table salt and globalistical warmening were dangerous.
Now, I will not get hysterical about this topic because I know that nobody is going to take away my guns or my (heavily-vetted) concealed-carry permit. It's politically impossible. Just one point: How come the gun nuts hate ordinary people having guns - any guns - while it seems fine for "important Liberal people" - like Sen Feinstein, who carries or used to, or Harry Reid, who has carried most of his life, or Mayor Bloomberg, surrounded by armed bodyguards despite his horror of guns, or a President surrounded by a small army of weaponry, or Oprah with her armed bodyguards, etc etc.?
This is America. We're all equal. I'm important too. All of my kids can handle firearms. Basic life skill, same as swimming and tennis and trigonometry and land navigation.
Slowing population growth. The restoration of massive swaths of farmland to nature. Increasing world food supplies. Lower food prices for billions of people. Massive water supplies beneath the driest deserts. Abundant oil and gas. The 21st century is looking like it will be a very different kind of place than the greens and Malthusians have warned us about.
Until the Newtown horror, the three worst K–12 school shootings ever had taken place in either Britain or Germany.
and
Economists John Lott and William Landes conducted a groundbreaking study in 1999, and found that a common theme of mass shootings is that they occur in places where guns are banned and killers know everyone will be unarmed, such as shopping malls and schools.
I sometimes wonder whether black Americans would be happy or disappointed to know how little most white Americans think about race. And more and more, I think they’d be disappointed. Or mad.
Sipp makes the case that life is accumulated error. Lots of truth in that. Even small errors in facts, in choices, in judgement, build on eachother and you eventually you can have a mess that you drag along with you. It's difficult in life to start on a clean slate.
In Maritime Academies, they always teach the famous case of the cargo ship leaving NY harbor headed for Brazil in the 1960s. After a day at sea, the ship beached itself on Fire Island on Long Island, NY. The autopilot, as today, was controlled by a gyro. When a gyro malfunctions and drifts, everything checks out and agrees with the malfunctioning gyro. When the ship hit the beach, the crew had no idea where they were. Degree by degree, over three watches, the ship had made a 180. I'll assume they hit the beach at night.
Well, everything checks out as consistent - unless somebody bothers to check the heading against an old-fashioned magnetic compass. There is a reason all ships still carry a sextant and a copy of Bowditch too.
I do not care for vodka in any form other than in a Bloody Mary or its variants, no matter what our team member Opie says about Grey Goose: I think it's just ethanol with a twist. (To me, a vodka Martini is only suited for auto fuel for the sanctimonious feel-gooders.)
At Maggie's Farm, we are feel-gooders of the other variety. While it's not a strictly holiday drink, I seem to only have Bloody Marys in the winter. Besides Irish Coffee, it's the only drink a proper gent can have before noon without looking like a drunk.
There are about a thousand different Bloody Mary recipes. Here's an interesting one. I used to have our wonderful Connecticut Yankee neighbor William F. Buckley Jr's recipe, which included canned beef broth or consomme and sounded like a complete wholesome meal in a glass - protein, vegetables, roughage (the celery stick) and booze - but I can't find it. (Thanks, reader. You remind me that some folks call that a Bloody Bull, but I'd still like to find his recipe - it obviously worked well for him.)
The Bloody Caesar (or plain "Caesar"), I learned recently, is the most popular mixed drink in Canada. It must be all that clam broth that makes Canadians so "nice." It could not be more simple, because the magic is in the magical Mott's Clamato. Rimming the glass with some lime and salt is a delicious touch and also wards off the dread Scurvy. I like the Spicy Clamato more than the regular. Here's the history of Clamato - one of Canada's great contributions to civilization, second only to the Labrador Retriever.
On most days, I'd take the Caesar over the Mary or the Bull. We olde Cape Codders cannot get away from that clam broth, which was Mother's milk to us ever since the kind Indians taught our ancestors how to dig the tasty quahogs.
Addendum: Opie doesn't want our readers to forget the Bloody Maria
Buddy's Comment: Miller was 14 years old, maybe 15, here, sez the comments. Rogers was a big star already, at 26, and let the kid have the part in the movie, and also let her steal this scene. Watch the micro moves in that under-a-minute span from 1:00 to 1:50 -
- A Mathematician, a Biologist and a Physicist are sitting in a street cafe watching people going in and coming out of the house on the other side of the street. First they see two people going into the house. Time passes. After a while they notice three persons coming out of the house. The Physicist: "The measurement wasn't accurate.". The Biologist: "They have reproduced". The Mathematician: "If now exactly one person enters the house then it will be empty again."
- A doctor, a lawyer, and a mathematician were having a conversation about the relative benefits of wives and mistresses.
The doctor insisted that, from a health perspective, it was far better to have a wife. He talked about stress, relaxation, routine, and other factors.
The lawyer contended that it was better to have a mistress, because that way you retain more of your legal rights, she doesn't own half your property, and so forth.
The mathematician said that he could see both sides of that argument, but really he thought it was best to have both.
"Both?", the doctor and the lawyer exclaimed. "Why?"
"Sure, both. That way, when the wife thinks you're with the mistress, and the mistress thinks you're with the wife, you can sneak off by yourself and do mathematics."
In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist:
This past spring, Harvard and MIT got the attention of everyone in the higher ed business when they announced a new online education venture called edX. The new venture will make online versions of the universities’ courses available to a virtually unlimited number of enrollees around the world. Think of the ramifications: Now anyone in the world with an internet connection can access the kind of high-level teaching and scholarship previously available only to a select group of the best and most privileged students.
Evil exists, does terrible damage in this world and in this life, but is conquered, overcome, in the final end.
The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir. h/t Dr. Bob, who is mostly on blog sabbatical. I am not too big on praise songs, but this one will not harm you too much.
Labor needs representation and many of the values that drew millions of working Americans into the labor movement endure. But few American institutions are as ill suited to the 21st century or have proved so inept at reorganization and reform as the unions.
President Obama's tenure as president will have as one of its benchmarks one of the worst and longest-running unemployment records in recent history -- and he will own it all by himself.
Edward Prescott has shown that the U.S. average marginal effective tax rate is around 40%. This means that if the average worker earns $100 from additional output, he will be able to consume only an additional $60.
"Ted Dalrymple" (Dr. Anthony Daniels) is, as readers know, a retired Brit Psychiatrist with experience in the prison system (as a physician, not as an inmate).
With or without prison experience, Psychiatrists, priests, and police officers have the experience to view people with a jaundiced eye, knowing perhaps better than most about what dark thoughts and motives lurk in the human soul because they are not in denial about the nature of human selfishness, deception and self-deception, envy, manipulativeness, sin, and evil.
In A Word to the Wise, Dalrymple questions the very premise of the idea of "man's inhumanity to man," from the Poles' treatment of their Jews to the modern British welfare state.
The Boy Who Became a World War II Veteran at 13 Years Old
"In the battle over gun rights in America, both sides have distorted history and the law, and there’s no resolution in sight."
The Daily Routines of Famous Writers
The cacophany from the gun nuts is getting intense these days, and very little of it makes logical sense to me. I spoke with a colleague gun nut this week who told me that she'd be afraid even to touch a gun. I promised to take her to the range to get over this phobia. Hoplophobia. Probably a mental illness. A firearm is just a pipe and a hammer.
Falconry season
Spam University
Sipp makes the case that 
I do not care for vodka in any form other than in a Bloody Mary or its variants, no matter what our team member Opie says about Grey Goose: I think it's just ethanol with a twist. (To me, a vodka Martini is only suited for auto fuel for the sanctimonious feel-gooders.) 
Vanderleun: 
This "Lost Generation" 
Peaceable Kingdom: Cart pulled by lion, two sheep, and a bear. More cart pics