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.
2:1 My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?
2:2 For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in,
2:3 and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, "Have a seat here, please," while to the one who is poor you say, "Stand there," or, "Sit at my feet,"
2:4 have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?
2:5 Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?
2:6 But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court?
2:7 Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?
2:8 You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
2:9 But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.
2:10 For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.
2:11 For the one who said, "You shall not commit adultery," also said, "You shall not murder." Now if you do not commit adultery but if you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.
2:12 So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty.
2:13 For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.
2:14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you?
2:15 If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food,
2:16 and one of you says to them, "Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill," and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?
2:17 So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
Re-posted because it's so good, because it's been in my brain all week, and because it's stormy here today:
Gonna make a lot of money, gonna go up north I'll plant and I'll harvest what the earth brings forth The hammer's on the table, the pitchfork's on the shelf For the love of God, you ought to take pity on yourself
...this is America’s best and brightest — or, at any rate, most expensively credentialed. Sandra Fluke has been blessed with a quarter-million dollars of elite education, and, on the evidence of Wednesday night, is entirely incapable of making a coherent argument. She has enjoyed the leisurely decade-long varsity once reserved for the minor sons of Mitteleuropean grand dukes, and she has concluded that the most urgent need facing the Brokest Nation in History is for someone else to pay for the contraception of 30-year-old children. She says the choice facing America is whether to be “a country where we mean it when we talk about personal freedom, or one where that freedom doesn’t apply to our bodies and our voices” — and, even as the words fall leaden from her lips, she doesn’t seem to comprehend that Catholic institutions think their “voices” ought to have freedom, too, or that Obamacare seizes jurisdiction over “our bodies” and has 16,000 new IRS agents ready to fine us for not making arrangements for “our” pancreases and “our” bladders that meet the approval of the commissars. Sexual liberty, even as every other liberty withers, is all that matters: A middle-school girl is free to get an abortion without parental consent, but if she puts a lemonade stand on her lawn she’ll be fined. What a bleak and reductive concept of “personal freedom.”
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim and roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves - goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices; Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is - Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces.
But we can't let that energy fade -- because in just 60 days, voters will decide who gets to serve in the White House for the next four years. So every single one of us has got to pull together to finish strong.
I know you feel the urgency: Already this week, supporters like you have made more than 500,000 grassroots donations to build this campaign. So if you're fired up, let's keep it going -- let's see how many people we can get to show their support by the end of the day.
Barack's got something that the other side doesn't: more than 3 million grassroots supporters like you -- and together we're going to win this election the right way.
The donation you give today will make a big impact in the final stage of this race. And on November 7th, you can wake knowing that you did everything you could to help us deliver on the full promise of the next four years.
Make this our biggest week yet, and give $5 or more right now to win this election in the final two months:
In 1890, rail was the dominant form of land transport. Now, it's a niche market and the passenger component is, alas, subsidy-dependent. I love trains, but (subsidized) highways, cars, trucks and airplanes won the battle for the future.
When I read the other day that food stamps are being used to buy pop tarts, cookies, honey buns, candy bars, corn dogs, taffy, and cheesecake, it finally clicked: liberal economic and social policies reward stoners.
...the same self-righteous progressive error—of the sense that the Republicans are offering radical individualism and a cold and selfish you’re-on-your-own philosophy of government. And to this extent it was answered by a very revealing display of the left’s tendency to collapse all of society—all that stands between the individual and the state—into the state. Different speakers this week took this up in different ways (starting with the opening video in which one of the speakers said that government is the only thing we all belong to), and Obama’s way was to say that his party’s alternative to the every man for himself philosophy of the Right is an idea of citizenship. “We believe in citizenship,” he said, “a word at the very heart of our founding, at the very essence of our democracy.” It’s an odd claim, as the word “citizenship” doesn’t appear in any founding document (and to the extent that “citizen” does it describes a legal resident, and never seems to be assigned much significance)...
I've been impressed by how effective the petite 20-something blonde trainers are in encouraging middle-aged men to push to their limits during their 5 am work-outs at my gym. (I suspect the healthy-looking male trainers have a similar impact on the ladies.)
That should be no surprise, of course, given male psychology. Gyms and blonde trainers don't come cheap, however.
Even before Paul Ryan touted his enthusiasm for the Insanity program, I had been hearing about it from people (Ryan uses Insanity and P90X). I kinda like the way the woman in the Insanity ad says "I want to feel good about sharing myself with my husband for many years to come." That's a great attitude.
The problem with home work-out regimens is the self-discipline. On the other hand, challenges to self-discipline are how we build character. But, on the other hand...
Nearly 65 years after Israel’s creation, two Palestinian societies emerge, new study shows - 60 percent of Israeli Arabs say they would not allow their daughter to marry a Palestinian from the West Bank
Dems certainly do know how to get rich in politics. Hillary has made $30 million of her own - a tidy sum for a "life dedicated to public service." Bill, I heard, has made about triple that.
Who was Herman Hollerith? His company, the Tabulating Machine Company (1890), was renamed International Business Machines in 1924. IBM, with headquarters in Armonk, NY, is currently the second-largest private employer in the US. When I was young, key punch systems were still in wide use.
Mia Love On Obama: “I Think He’s Stripping Away the American Dream & the America As We Know It”
VDH: The New Reactionaries - The causes of poverty, the effects of liberal policies — such things are undiscussable. One quote:
If today an observer were to state that the number of children one chooses to have should be in part predicated on the income one reasonably expects to make (I think that is why so-called yuppies often choose to have two rather than five children), then he would be branded illiberal or worse — despite the fact that societies have accepted that premise for centuries, and the middle classes implicitly follow such common calculations. Thanks to today’s government help, the illegal immigrant from Oaxaca might eventually achieve rough parity with the American-born middle class if he were to have two children; however, with five it is impossible.
These elegant stone barns were the dairy operation on the Rockefeller family's Kykuit Manor estate in Pocantico Hills, NY -a charming semi-rural hamlet nestled between the remarkably named villages of Sleepy Hollow and Pleasantville, one which has probably the highest-performing public schools in NY if not in the entire USA. Also, a famous Matisse and Chagall church.
The family recently deeded 1200 acres of their pasture and woodlands to New York State as parkland, now Rockefeller State Park Preserve. It has 20 miles of scenic riding and hiking trails, many overlooking the Hudson River. The parking lot was filled with horse trailers.
This land is only 25 miles north of Manhattan, 8 miles north of White Plains in Westchester County. That's what is remarkable about it.
The stone barns area of the preserve is now operated as a demonstration organic farm (definitely not vegan - they grow their own free-range pigs, beef, chickens, lamb, turkeys and geese), and is the site of the Blue Hill Restaurant. They only cook local, and pretty much all of their food comes from their farm, year-round, like old-timey farmers. They do not make their own Coke or Scotch whiskey, however. We stopped by for a stroll and a late lunch last weekend. Blue Hill has no menu, reservations required, but their cafe is casual.
OK, I think eating local is silly and that "organic" is a foolish fad. Harmless efforts, though. I did happen to notice that the natural gas which runs their a/c is imported from out-of-state because NY still has no fracking. Same for the greenhouse heating system for winter. Local food, imported energy. Guess that passes as "green" these days.
... the PhD is not being hired for anything other than part-time teaching; the JD is reduced to the law library gofer; the freshly minted MD is the equivalent of a salaried, high-paid nurse; the credentialed high-school teacher is subbing; the engineer is a draftsman; the carpenter is cobbling together home repair mini-jobs. The new plum job? Landing one of those federal or state regulatorships, inspectorships, or clerkships, which are paid for with borrowed money, produce little, and grow as those they audit and fine shrink.
In other words, we are seeing the proverbial chickens coming home to roost in an economy that has run up $16 trillion in debt, regulated its way into paralysis, hounded the private sector, and demonized profit-making.
It's time for a new approach. I hope the youngsters will realize that before the talents of an entire generation are wasted, and hope for the future (besides a hope for free birth control) is destroyed by hopey-changey.
I'd prefer a more intimate, less insistent, rapid, and more modulated delivery, but Marco delivers the basic conservative message as only the kids of immigrants can do. He will mellow and ripen with age. (He is welcome to email me for advice!).
My other problem with his fine speech is equating power and/or money with the American Dream. There are over 300 million American dreams, no two of them identical. Freedom from the state, and opportunity with real risk and the possibility of real personal satisfaction with the shaping of unique lives, is what matters. The chance to follow your own heart and mind, bearing in mind that it might not work out and everybody might need a Plan B and a Plan C.
Only immigrants and the kids of new immigrants can remind us of how entitled and decadent we have had become.
Today is a holiday in the US, one in which we celebrate the antiquated, retrogressive (but once-necessary) union movement with beaches, beer, barbecuing, and fun. My celebratory efforts entail tennis in the morning and kayaking in the afternoon. How about you?
The left has died as an intellectual force worth taking seriously. Its mission belongs to another time. It is reduced to fighting for political power alone, and its weapons are what we recently called “the politics of personal destruction.” It’s the only way they can hope to win. None of us should be surprised when the leftists accuse the righties of pushing old women off of cliffs, or murdering cancer-afflicted employees, or waging war on women, and so forth. They have to destroy their opponents one by one. They no longer have a “movement” of any significance.
That’s what happens when you become an anachronism. For me, the greatest line of the week was Ryan’s, the one about the fading Obama poster on the wall of an unemployed young American.
Once upon a time, the left was able to lay claim to intellectual and moral superiority, and to look at the conservatives with imperious disdain. No more.
Jeu de paume ("hand-game" or "palm game") was the handball precursor to raquet tennis. Paris' Jeu de Paume Gallery is in an old court.
"Real tennis," or "court tennis" came next. I had fun watching some pros play this on the court at Hampton Court a few years ago. There are a number of Real Tennis courts in the US, including one at the exclusive NY Raquet and Tennis Club on Park Avenue (men only).
Lawn Tennis was invented as a casual outdoor version of the wonderful game. I still prefer playing my tennis indoors: I play much better, and I cannot serve into the sun worth a damn.
Remember the Tennis Court Oath of the French Revolution? I believe that was a Court Tennis court.
Image is Jacques Louis David's Tennis Court Oath. It did not end up well because they were not Americans.
Clint Eastwood talks #ECOTUS
Is 
I've been impressed by how effective the petite 20-something blonde trainers are in encouraging middle-aged men to push to their limits during their 5 am work-outs at my gym. (I suspect the healthy-looking male trainers have a similar impact on the ladies.)
Kentucky WWII Vet Earl Jones, 92, 
VDH: 
Chart via 
