Maggie's Farm

Don't vote: It just encourages the bastards.

P.J. O'Rourke

Not from The Onion: Lefty academics convene in Berkeley to try to make sense of the Tea Party movement.

Barack Obama echoes anti-Americanism of Europe in calling voters stupid

But how did Americans go from smart to stupid in two short years?

Don’t Tell Me Why I Hate Woodrow Wilson (h/t, View from 1776)

Barone: Voters Fed up With Obama's Big, Bossy Government

The out-of-control big-money donors this fall aren’t the U.S. Chamber of Commerce types, as the White House would have you believe. Mark McKinnon on the real culprits—union gifts to Democrats.

The dirty ploy with the Chamber of Commerce was a red herring.

Sometimes a fellow just wants a big bowl of Bob Evans sausage gravy dumped on top of a pile of good biscuits.

Many doctors claim the gravy smooths your arterial linings, thus extending life. The biscuits provide serenity and peace of mind in this troubled world, and many peer-reviewed studies confirm this. It is settled science.

I love to have excuses to travel to places where you can get good biscuits and gravy for breakfast, but I have too few opportunities to do so.

What's your favorite way to dine on this treat? Crumble the biscuit? Split the biscuit? Dump it on top of an intact biscuit? Such details matter in life.

The University of Chicago played Kenyon College in Gambier yesterday afternoon! Neither of the colleges recruit athletes nor offer athletic scholarships. Lots of fumbles, simple bleachers, no cheerleaders, and no admission charge. BYOB. Note cornfields in the distance. 

Good fun, like a high school game.

Who won? Don't know and don't really care. I never really care very much about sports scores unless I am playing.

These intellectual schools do have their share of sturdy, fine-lookin' young lads, however, according to the BD pupette. Just a lot smarter and far more academically talented than the usual, says she. Literarily or mathematically-inclined. What a wonderful world.

More Ohio pics later.

Purists might object, but these things are made of "resin," not wood. They are heavy. They have been outdoors for over a year and had accumulated mildew and dirt, so I decided to give them a bleach spray bath last weekend. It worked like magic.

I asked Mrs. BD whether she wanted me to put them inside someplace for the winter and she told me not to bother. "They're resin." I said "You mean plastic." I never realized it. I am happy to know that a lifetime of scraping, painting, and replacing rotting Adirondack chairs is over.

Seaside Casual Furniture, from Rhode Island. Only somebody like Sipp would notice that they aren't the real thing.

2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18

4:6 As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come.

4:7 I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.

4:8 From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have longed for his appearing.

4:16 At my first defense no one came to my support, but all deserted me. May it not be counted against them!

4:17 But the Lord stood by me and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. So I was rescued from the lion's mouth.

4:18 The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and save me for his heavenly kingdom. To him be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

On Cape Cod in September. Thought blogger colleague Retriever might enjoy this pic.

I have a fatal disease in my large, probably 100 year-old Copper Beech tree. I have diagnosed it as Beech Bark Disease. I've seen the same bark disease on many old Copper Beeches recently - areas of shedding bark on the trunk and dying branches high overhead. It's a damn shame.

'Charity Has Never Solved Anything'

...imagine if your car insurance covered every scratch or dent. Wouldn't you expect your premiums to rise to meet the expanded coverage? And wouldn't you expect your auto repair shops to become clogged with cars that didn't really need to be repaired, competing for time and space with other cars with broken transmissions or burnt-out motors?

If we want lower insurance premiums, we will need to return to a system that favors high deductible, high co-pay catastrophic-type insurance with a built-in disincentive for overuse, such as the kind that some employers have provided as an option up until now. Patients could pay for office visits from health savings accounts or other flexible spending tax shelters. More than 10 million Americans already have such accounts.

A Lukewarmer speaks at Watts. Good comments on the post.

Prof B: How much is too much when it comes to taxes?

Climate regulations coming for trucks, buses

Let's bring on a new Ice Age

No normal human does not enjoy the smell of bacon

Moslems need to lighten up and learn more tolerance.

FOX is the most tolerant network

Greg Sullivan: Buy, Mortimer, Buy! - The Saga of Maine Family Robinson Continues

Anchoress on The Brutality of Grace and Cormac McCarthy

Did you ever see the film El Topo? McCarthy is like that.

Three Charts that Will Infuriate Taxpayers

Public Employees Union Spends Huge to Save Dems

This is corrupt.

The homelessness industry has re-branded San Francisco's street bums (h/t  Lucianne).

It's quite a story. The homeless advocates are begging and manipulating for money in a way which is similar to that of the seemingly-sociopathic panhandlers.

An Old Man's Winter Night

All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him -- at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off; -- and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man -- one man -- can't keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night.

One of the good things about this handyman special on Route 6 in Wellfleet is that you can just walk up the dirveway to the Cumbie and the liquor store. What does anybody really need that cannot be got at one of those places?

Beers range between around 3% to around 9% alcohol by volume. I prefer the lower numbers because it is pleasant to enjoy a few brews without really feeling it.

You can look up your favorite beer's alcohol content (and calories) here.

Over the transom:

Waimea Bay shore-break surfing pioneer, husband, and father of two, Clark Little has gained nationwide recognition for his photography with appearances on Good Morning America, Inside Edition, and many local news stations across the U.S.

It all started in 2007 when Clark 's wife wanted a nice piece of art to decorate a wall. Voluntarily, Clark grabbed a camera, jumped in the water, and starting snapping away capturing the beauty and power of monstrous Hawaiian waves from the inside out.

"Clark's view" is a unique view of the ocean that most will only be able to experience safely on land while studying one of Clark 's photos. 

Now with a camera upgrade and an itch to get that better shot, Clark has taken this on full time and has moved his office from land, to the inside of a barrel. 

Here is Little's website.

Is it time to return to caveman parenting?

Stone Age families didn't spank and relied on multiple caregivers to raise their kids, research claims.

It sounds like Noble Savage silliness to me - the idealization of the primitive - although I am sure stone-age tribal people did share in watching the kids. Tribal kid-watching still makes sense today. The nuclear nucular family is a socio-cultural aberration.

Over the transom:

One year, I decided to buy my mother-in-law a cemetery plot as a Christmas gift... The next year, I didn't buy her a gift.
When she asked me why, I replied,
"Well, you still haven't used the gift I bought you last year!"
And that's how the fight started.....
____________________________
My wife and I were watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire while we were in bed. I turned to her and said, 'Do you want to have Sex?' 'No,' she answered. I then said, 'Is that your final answer?'
She didn't even look at me this time, simply saying, 'Yes..'
So I said, "Then I'd like to phone a friend."
And that's when the fight started...
______________________________
My wife and I were sitting at a table at her high school reunion, and she kept staring at a drunken man swigging his drink as he sat alone at a nearby table.
I asked her, "Do you know him?" "Yes", she sighed,
"He's my old boyfriend.... I understand he took to drinking right after we split up those many years ago, and I hear he hasn't been sober since."
"My God!" I said, "Who would think a person could go on celebrating that long?"
And then the fight started...

A few more below the fold -

From Mike Huckabee:

"NPR has discredited itself as a forum for free speech and a protection of the First Amendment rights of all and has solidified itself as the purveyor of politically correct pabulum and protector of views that lean left."

NPR exists in a kindergarten dream world. NPR has hated Williams since he dared to discuss self-destructive black subcultures. That is a no-no even though everybody knows about it.

Also see Opinion: Juan Williams, NPR and the Death of Liberalism.

More on the embarassment at Widener Law School

With open gays now free to join the army, Ivy League to bring back ROTC any second now, right?

VDH: How our first postracial, postnational, bipartisan president has revealed himself to be a condescending doctrinaire ideologue.

Shamelessly stolen from TigerHawk (who is welcome to steal from us any time):

Quoted in an otherwise appreciative City Journal review of a Normal Rockwell show, this supercilious comment:

Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik, who in reviewing the show derided Rockwell as the cowardly, “aw, shucks” epitome of Middle America. Rockwell “doesn’t challenge any of us, or himself, to think new thoughts or try new acts or look with fresh eyes,” wrote Gopnik. “From the docile realism of his style to the received ideas of his subjects, Rockwell reliably keeps us right in the middle of our comfort zone.”

I can't stand people who write like that. I almost thought it was satire, at first.

Whoever decided that art was meant to afflict comfort? Comfort is a good thing, and difficult to obtain. Sure, art ought to be stimulating in some way - like any other sort of entertainment - or nobody would buy it.  Art is entertainment. We love looking at pictures and designs of all sorts.

Here's Rockwell's 1962 Saturday Evening Post cover pic, The Connoisseur. It makes me think new thoughts and try new acts, and I think his Pollock imitation is better than Pollock:

Re Code Pink:

The evidence clearly indicates that Code Pink's mission gave aid and comfort to America's wartime enemies in Fallujah, a clear-cut act of sedition made possible by the group's allies in Congress -- Democrats Barbara Boxer, Henry Waxman, Raul Grijalva, and Dennis Kucinich.

Politico: 99 Democrat seats on the wall, 99 Democrat seats … 

Surber: Generic polls are worse than Democrats think

Dems have become the government union choice

Amusing: Historic Illiteracy: Idiot Sarah Palin "Party Like It's 1773" After The Election!

America needs more rich, not fewer

Can Tancredo win in Colorado?

It's a screwy election there.

Many of my more enlightened friends like to ask me: How could someone as intellectually gifted, delightfully urbane, profoundly moral and breathlessly handsome not want to spit at these stupid tea party candidates, with their stupid positions and their stupid stupidity? (That's slightly embellished; obviously, I'm not that handsome.)

The need for Democrat cross-burning in order to keep blacks in the underclass is over. Democrats have succeeded in creating black intellectual serfs who are so swayed by the blandishments of Big Government and the empty anti-capitalist rhetoric of the left that they don't even realize they've been hoodwinked by some of the biggest beneficiaries of capitalism!

Unless black liberals realize they've been the victims of a decades-long election-buying rip-off perpetrated by the Democrats -- and advanced using the cat's-paws of the black faces in the leftist elite -- the black community will remain in the quagmire of despair it has been in since the Democrats started handing black people their scraps to live off.

The black community's allegiance to Democrats is among the most shameful political facts in American history -- and it can be ended only by the articulation of a true conservative message from passionate, intrepid, and ethnically diverse messengers.

Murchison: How Big Should Government Be? A quote:

No genius can figure out what government could do "for us" if it really tried. Easier to figure is what it might instead do "to us" once it really decided to save us: narrowing choices, curtailing the varied freedoms of action Americans still enjoy. That's why there's this lawsuit in Florida (as in other venues), where the wait-a-cotton-picking-minute spirit has Our Protectors at least momentarily on the defensive.

If the Feds can tax a non-activity (ie not buying the insurance plan they want us to buy), they can tax anything we don't do, "for our own good."

I am annoyed with Obamacare for at least three additional reasons:

1) I am very happy with my catastrophic ("major medical") insurance plan. It covers nothing elective or "preventive," no obstetrics, no vision, no dental, and has a $5000 deductible. I can see any physician I choose. Even including the deductible, it's relatively cheap. Under Obamacare, I cannot own this insurance.

2) The politicization of medical care promises to be an unholy mess.

3) There will be perverse incentives for your doctors to under-treat you.

Carl Sagan's bunkometer list, via SDA re global warming climate change climate disruption:

• Whenever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts”


• Encourage substantive debate on the “evidence” by knowledgable proponents of all points of view.


• Arguments from authority carry little weight as “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that there are no authorities; at most; there are “experts”.


• Spin a variety of hypotheses. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each. The ones that survive are the ones to do in depth study on.


• Do not become attached to any hypothesis just because it’s yours. Find reasons for rejecting all, including your own, hypothesis.


• Quantify. If whatever you are explaining has a measure, quantify it so that measurement is more possible. Vague hypothesis, or those difficult to quantify will be the most difficult to prove or disprove.


• If there is a chain argument, then each and every link must work, including the premise.


• Use Occam’s Razor; which is to choose the hypothesis that explains the data in the simplest terms.


• Ask: is the Hypothesis testable and falsifiable. Hypothesis that are not testable are not worth much. Could you duplicate accurately, at least theoretically, the hypothesis?

I am reading - or trying to read - McDonogh's 2007 After The Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift. It's about the horrors inflicted on ethnic Germans by the Allies in the years following WW2. Prussia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany.

This is indeed a tale which nobody wants to hear, and it is gut-wrenching to read.

Probably 3 million ethnic Germans were killed after the war ended, including around one million surrendered soldiers. From Nigel Jones' excellent review:

The two million German civilians who died were largely the old, women and children: victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide - and mass murder.

Apart from the well-known repeated rape of virtually every girl and woman unlucky enough to be in the Soviet occupation zones, perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh - for the first time in English - is the slaughter of a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans by their vengeful Czech compatriots. The survivors of this ethnic cleansing, naked and shivering, were pitched across the border, never to return to their homes. Similar scenes were seen across Poland, Silesia and East Prussia as age-old German communities were brutally expunged.

Read the whole brief review to get an idea.

Seems to me that the Czechs were the most brutal and bloody to the Germans in the German-majority Sudetenland, but the Red Army was close behind. In this time period, the Czechs reduced their prosperous German population from 3 million to the handful today - ethnic cleansing by murder, torture, forced death marches, exile, and in concentration camps (the camps were widely used to incarcerate, starve, torture and kill Germans in the Red Army regions).