Monday, February 1. 2010
Chart above via Dino. It splains a lot. No real world experience.
The new Blaser R8
Peer groups and self-control
Too cold for windmills in Minnesota
100 years of radio broadcasting
Now, Pew Says, Marriage Is a Better Deal for Men Than Women. Maybe that's why gays want marriage?
We do get it, Mr. President; we just don't like it
Russia urged China to dump Fannie, Freddie bonds in 2008
Your Tax Dollars at Work: the Civil ‘Service’ That’s Eating America
More on the Pachauri scandal. Related: IPCC loses all credibility
By all means keep the public out of the health care debates. The people are a real problem for politicans.
The "aspiring classes". Aren't we all? All aspiring for different things, too.
Haitians beg USA to take them over. No thanks.
Record cold grips the planet. What does this mean?
Remember this?
To: Howlin
Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman.
In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts.
The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90’s. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn’t used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80’s used monospaced fonts.
I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old.
This should be pursued aggressively.
47 posted on Wednesday, September 08, 2004 11:59:43 PM by Buckhead
From Tom Bowler's The Decade the MSM Won at Pajamas.
Sunday, January 31. 2010
Thanks for inventing the internet. You thought of everything. It never ceases to amaze me how much stuff you managed to put on there.
I just found out that I can buy opera tickets for the Arena di Verona (a vast Roman arena) for August online, now. Looks like a fun outing, but the arena seems to big for opera.
Their stories at the Globe.
Saturday, January 30. 2010
 At what point do American Liberals become Conservatives? I mean, at what point would government and government control and redistribution be sufficient to satisfy them so that they would cease seeking more, and just stop and try to freeze it in a Conservative fashion, as happened in the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, and China?
One of the things that converted me to Conservatism years ago was that none of my Liberal and Lefty friends could or would answer that question. I liked to ask them what arguments they could make against free food, socialized legal insurance and auto insurance, free nose jobs and boob jobs and IQ injections - and free PhDs in Social Justice and Peace Studies for all.
It gradually dawned on me that they had a dream of an eternal childhood of ease, like many peoples' dream of a Florida or Arizona retirement or of being the wife of a hedge fund owner (but with them in control of it, I suppose, to keep the personal dreams and spirits of others stifled for the greater good).
Being a bred-in-the-bone New England Yankee Puritan, I find the idea of ease and irresponsibility to be repellent. Except occasionally...as a treat. We seek effort and additional effort - hence Maggie's Farm.
(Photo is of a life of ease. Even the effort of chasing birds is pure fun for this fine fellow, who has it made thanks to the benevolence of his master.)
Thus our stale repost below from a few years ago for those who haven't seen it -
 At NY Rev of Books. One quote:
The number of legal chess positions is 1040, the number of different possible games, 10120. Authors have attempted various ways to convey this immensity, usually based on one of the few fields to regularly employ such exponents, astronomy. In his book Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman points out that a player looking eight moves ahead is already presented with as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy. Another staple, a variation of which is also used by Rasskin-Gutman, is to say there are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe. All of these comparisons impress upon the casual observer why brute-force computer calculation can't solve this ancient board game.
Image is Turner's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1823)
A "childe" is a youth on the career track to become a knight. Our Massachusetts Maine friend Sipp brought Byron's (George Gordon, Lord Byron) masterpiece Childe Harold to mind with his killer quote from Canto 3 of the epic:
He who, grown aged in this world of woe,
In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life,
So that no wonder waits him; nor below
Can love or sorrow, fame, ambition, strife,
Cut to his heart again with the keen knife
Of silent, sharp endurance: he can tell
Why thought seeks refuge in lone caves, yet rife
With airy images, and shapes which dwell
Still unimpaired, though old, in the soul's haunted cell.
The entire narrative poem is here, but is best read in dead tree form. Better yet, read out loud. Lord Byron, like Dylan and Sippican and a bunch of other special people, has (or is, or was) an Old Soul - regardless of age. It's a gift - or maybe a curse. Maybe both.
Friday, January 29. 2010
 Dress shoes need to be shined regularly if you do not wish to look bedraggled, don't they?
A spit shine requires a little water (or spit). Here's the USMA method.
And from The Art of Manliness, here's How to Shine Shoes like a Soldier.
It takes a toothbrush to do it right and to get into the seams. People say 30-40 minutes per shoe for a definitive shine, less for a touch-up shine. Obsessionals like to top off a shine with a coat of clear polish.
I read that you are supposed to edge the sole too. News to me, but makes sense.
Photo is a good J. Press Oxford shoe - off the rack and not too fancy, but good enuf for government or academic work. Maybe when I win the lottery I'll have foot molds taken in London and Rome and have them make me custom shoes and loafers like my prosperous friends do.
'Liar' is just as ugly a word as 'thief,' because it implies the presence of just as ugly a sin in one case as in the other. If a man lies under oath or procures the lie of another under oath, if he perjures himself or suborns perjury, he is guilty under the statute law.
Under the higher law, under the great law of morality and righteousness, he is precisely as guilty if, instead of lying in a court, he lies in a newspaper or on the stump; and in all probability, the evil effects of his conduct are infinitely more widespread and more pernicious.
Teddy Roosevelt.
It reminds me that Dr. Bliss says "Lying is worse than theft of property, because it is the theft of somebody's reality."
Howard Zinn. America the Awful---Howard Zinn's History.
Old Stalinists never die, they just fade away.
Thursday, January 28. 2010
"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money - only for wanting to keep your own money."
Joseph Sobran
We have it pretty good these days. From Gene Expression:
Geneticists have long known that the ancestors of modern humans numbered as few as 10,000 at some time in the last 100,000 years. The critically low number suggested that some catastrophe, like disease or climate change induced by a volcano, had brought humans close to the brink of extinction.
If the new estimate is correct, however, human population size has been small and fairly constant throughout most of the last million years, ruling out the need to look for a catastrophe.
Assuming an average census size on the order of 50,000, it seems as if our species stumbled onto a rather "risky" strategy of avoiding extinction. From what I recall conservation biologists start to worry about random stochastic events (e.g., a virulent disease) driving a species to extinction once its census size reaches 1,000. I suppose the fact that we were spread out over multiple continents would have mitigated the risk, but still.... It also brings me back to my post from yesterday, it seems that for most of human history we are a miserable species on the margins of extinction. For the past 10,000 years we were a miserable species. And now a substantial proportion of us are no long miserable (it seems life is actually much improved from pre-modern Malthusianism outside of Africa and South Asia). If only Leibniz could have seen it!
Wednesday, January 27. 2010
 Driscoll notes that the one nation ignored by the O about their amazingly swift and generous aid to Haiti was Israel and their IDF medical and rescue teams. with their field hospitals.
Thus our photo of an IDF babe from Double Tapper, who has more. (h/t, Theo)
Off topic - We are adding to our blogroll the following good sites:
The Future of Capitalism
Fausta (who has a good post today about Venezuela)
Big Journalism
 "If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."
Samuel Adams (Image is Copley's 1772 portrait of the firebrand rabble-rouser and tea-partyer)
Tuesday, January 26. 2010
The new New Left consists of public employees and their handlers, says Malanga.
There are two Americas: the tax-eaters and the taxpayers. And, he says, there are no red or blue states: only blue metropolitan areas. One quote:
What makes these cities so Blue is a multifaceted liberal coalition that ranges from old-style industrial unionists and culturally liberal intellectuals, journalists, and entertainers to tort lawyers, feminists, and even politically correct financiers. But within this coalition, one group stands out as increasingly powerful and not quite in step with the old politics of the Left: those who benefit from an expanding government, including public-sector employees, workers at organizations that survive off government money, and those who receive government benefits. In cities, especially, this group has seized power from the taxpayers, as the vast expansion of the public sector that has taken place since the beginning of the War on Poverty has finally reached a tipping point. In New York City, this coalition has helped roll back some of the reforms of the Giuliani years. In California cities and towns...
Malanga at City Journal with The Real Engine of Blue America. (h/t, reader BL). I am reminded of Ben Franklin's quote:
"When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."
 As I was considering some dinner plans, naturally the idea of foie-gras-stuffed quail came to mind.
Quail, around here, are Bob Whites. (Hunters in the South call them "birds," hence the origin of the term bird dog.) Habitat loss and development is the main reason that these Eastern US birds are approaching endangered status in parts of their range. You can read about them here.
I have heard them calling their name out on Nantucket, Long Island and on Cape Cod, but nowhere inland in New England.
Fortunately, they are readily pen-raised and thus easily available at supermarkets - and for preserve shooters who typically, even in the South, release thousands of pen-raised birds for the pleasure of the sports.
This site has 91 quail recipes.
|
What was never mentioned in the SOTU? 
