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.
As a black man, I love it when ignorant white women like Janeane Garofalo speak for all blacks. It's thrilling to me that Janeane would take time out of her busy Hollyweird life to protect me and my peeps -- the downtrodden, the oppressed...the lowly Negro.
For her efforts, I thank Garofalo, and anoint her Janeane Garofalo: White Chick Protector of the Lowly Negro.
Bob Dylan fans are in for a treat. The man’s new album, Together Through Life, will be released on April 27. Before that, Dylan begins the latest instalment of the Never-Ending Tour at Sheffield Arena on Friday; and Thursday sees the publication of Revolution in the Air, a new book by the man The New York Times described as “the only Dylanologist worth reading”, Clinton Heylin.
Georgia born-and-raised, and CT resident Flannery O'Connor died of lupus at 39 in 1964.
A collection of her occasional pieces, Mystery and Manners, was assembled by her friend the translator and poet Robert Fitzgerald. In that collection is a gem of an essay, "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade."
In my teaching days, no single document shaped my thinking as much as Flannery O'Connor's 1963 essay called "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade." It concerned neither guns nor violence, neither cliques nor experimental approaches to the treatment of adolescent depression. It was about . . . books. In defending the teaching of the great works of the Western canon rather than those of the modern day (which kids far preferred), she said something wise, the sort of thing an adult might say. She said that the whims and preferences of children should always, always be sublimated to the sense and judgment of their elders. "And what if the student finds this is not to his taste?" O'Connor asked. "Well that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed."
In other ages the attention of children was held by Homer and Virgil, among others, but, by the reverse evolutionary process, that is no longer possible; our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. No one asks the student if algebra pleases him or if he finds it satisfactory that some French verbs are irregular, but if he prefers Hersey to Hawthorne, his taste must prevail.
No child needs to be assigned Hersey or Steinbeck until he is familiar with a certain amount of the best work of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, the early James, and Crane [we can quibble with the names; I certainly quibble with Cooper’s inclusion], and he does not need to be assigned these until he has been introduced to some of the better English novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The fact that these works do not present him with the realities of his own time is all to the good. He is surrounded by the realities of his own time, and he has no perspective whatever from which to view them. Like the college student who wrote in her paper on Lincoln that he went to the movies and got shot, many students go to college unaware that the world was not made yesterday; their studies began with the present and dipped backward occasionally when it seemed necessary or unavoidable.
The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.
And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.
The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things — war and hunger and date rape — liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things.... It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.
1We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— 2this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us— 3we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. 4We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.
5This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. 6If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; 7but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
8If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
2My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; 2and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.
3Now by this we may be sure that we know him, if we obey his commandments. 4Whoever says, “I have come to know him,” but does not obey his commandments, is a liar, and in such a person the truth does not exist; 5but whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God has reached perfection. By this we may be sure that we are in him.
Despite the current global cooling, the Dem congress is determined to tax the heck out of your energy use and the EPA wants to regulate the heck out of it. Via Breitbart:
The court case, brought by Massachusetts, focused only on emissions from automobiles. But it is widely assumed that if the EPA must regulate emissions from cars and trucks, it will have no choice but to control similar pollution from power plants and industrial sources.
The EPA wants to unleash a "regulatory barrage that will destroy jobs, raise energy prices for consumers, and undermine America's global competitiveness," complained Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., one of Congress' most vocal skeptics of global warming.
In addition to carbon dioxide, a product of burning fossil fuels, the EPA finding covers five other emissions that scientists believe are warming the earth when they concentrate in the atmosphere: Methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6).
As readers know, we don't think this is about science: we think it is about taxation and control, with the science as a convenient untruth. I guess we could be wrong, but we do read the info.
A serious marathoner friend recently told me that she had leased one of these to train for the Boston Marathon (on Monday). She does 2/3 of her running on the road, and 1/3 on the G.
60 miles/week, plus pool running and swimming a mile every other day. Yes, she is slim and ripped, but prone to shin splints over 40-50 miles/week on the road. She tends to come in right behind "the elites," as runners term them.
She complains that her job interferes with her training. Luckily, her husband and 3 kids are jocks and thus good supporters.
The G was designed as a rehab machine. It's about effort without injury. Review of the anti-gravity treadmill here.
Pool running is cheaper. These things cost $75,000.
The Grateful Dead always performed on Persian carpets. Rug Rag takes a look at what The Dead, as they are now known, walk around on.
And speaking of rugs, here's a 5X6 Bakhtiari "flower bed" design I like. I now must brace myself for the rug expert readers to inform me of everything that is wrong with it...Our rug expert readers must understand that our rugs get rough treatment. They are subject to ice-melting salt, dogs, driveway gravel, work boots, mud, and the occasional spilled glass of red wine. Truly special antique rugs would a shame to use and abuse as we do. New-made rugs? Wouldn't touch 'em. Vulgar, garish-looking junk, most of it, with all the character of a Woolworth's velvet kitten picture.
In an interview by Paul Bradshaw with Rick Warren, Rick said:
"People ask me, What is the purpose of life? And I respond: In a nutshell, life is preparation for eternity. We were not made to last forever, and God wants us to be with him in heaven. One day my heart is going to stop, and that will be the end of my body - but not the end of me. I may live 60 to 100 years on earth, but I am going to spend trillions of years in eternity.
This is the warm-up act - the dress rehearsal. God wants us to practice on earth what we will do forever in eternity. We were made by God and for God, and until you figure that out, life isn't going to make sense. Life is a series of problems: either you are in one now, you're just coming out of one, or you're getting ready to go into another one.
The reason for this is that God is more interested in your character than your comfort; God is more interested in making your life holy than He is in making your life happy. We can be reasonably happy here on earth, but that's not the goal of life. The goal is to grow in Christ-likeness.
This past year of my life has been the greatest year of my life, but also the toughest with my wife, Kay, getting cancer. I used to think that life was hills and valleys - you go through a dark time, then you go to the mountain, back and forth. I don't believe that anymore.
Rather than life being hills and valleys, I believe that it's kind of like two rails on a railroad track, and at all times you have something good and something bad in your life. No matter how good things are in your life, there is always something bad that needs to be worked on. And no matter how bad things are in your life, there is always something good you can thank God for.
You can focus on your purposes, or you can focus on your problems. If you focus on your problems, you're going into self-centeredness: my problems, my issues, my pain. But one of the easiest ways to get rid of pain is to get your focus off yourself and onto God and others. We discovered quickly that in spite of the prayers of hundreds of thousands of people, God was not going to heal Kay or to make it easy for her. It has been very difficult for her, and yet God has strengthened her character, given her a ministry of helping other people, given her a testimony, drawn her closer to Him and to people.
You have to learn to deal with both the good and the bad of life. Actually, sometimes learning to deal with the good is harder. For instance, this past year, all of a sudden, when the book sold 15 million copies, it made me instantly very wealthy. It also brought a lot of notoriety that I never had to deal with before. I don't think God gives you money or notoriety for your own ego or for you to live a life of ease.
So I began to ask God what He wanted me to do with this money, this notoriety, this influence. He gave me two different passages that helped me decide what to do, ll Corintians 9 and Psalm 72. First, in spite of all the money coming in, we would not change our life style one bit. We made no major purchases. Second, about midway through last year, I stopped taking a salary from the church. Third, we set up foundations to fund an initiative we call The Peace Plan to plant churches, equip leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, and educate the next generation. Fourth, I added up all that the church had paid me in the 24 years since I had started the church, and paid it all back. It was liberating to me to serve God for free.
We need to ask ourselves: Am I going to live for possessions? Popularity? Am I going to be driven by pressures? Guilt? Bitterness? Materialism? Or am I going to be driven by God's purposes?
When I get up in the morning, I sit on the side of my bed and say God, if I don't get anything else done today, I want to know You more and love You better. God didn't put me on earth to fulfill a to-do list. He's more interested in what I am than what I do."
Like you care, right? The purpose is really to highlight a novel, Brothers, by Da Chen.
I seem to read novels as 1/3 of what I read, but I will read whatever is put in front of me, and whatever serendipity provides me with. Nothing on TV engages me. I always bear in mind that somebody worked darn hard to write that book.
Da Chen is an American author, raised in China during the Cultural Revolution. Besides being a compelling story, the book offers lots of insight into how China really operates - especially inside the political aristocracy.
One thing you learn right away is that in most Socialist and Communist nations, power and money and chicks and perks and mansions with military guards and vacation homes and the best food and drink and fancy cars accrue to the pols and their kin instead of to the productive. They create their own ingrown, inbred aristocracy with the power of the money, the government, the bureaucracy and the military to support and maintain it. They re-create Feudalism with the Mandarins and the "masses." We, dear readers, are supposed to be "the grateful masses."
(At the time that he writes about, 80% of China's adults were government employees. Not any more, happily. Canada is now up to 20%, last I heard, and headed up. Government employees are easy to control - and very easy to tax.)
I wonder how many of the people who profess to believe in the leveling ideas of collectivism and egalitarianism really just believe that they themselves are good for nothing. I mean, how many leftists are animated by a quite reasonable self-loathing? In their hearts they know that they are not going to become scholars or inventors or industrialists or even ordinary good kind people. So they need a way to achieve that smugness for which the left is so justifiably famous. They need a way to achieve self-esteem without merit. Well, there is politics. In an egalitarian world everything will be controlled by politics, and politics requires no merit.
P.J. O'Rourke. Yes, for some people self-love is more important than accomplishment.
I’m thrilled about the handwringing, Kumbayah-singing, peacenik left’s new enthusiasm for swift, extra-judicial 7.62 justice by executive order, and the lack of calls for human rights investigations, prosecutions, etc.
He's not joking: We have created more pirates. Good grief. We had the power to create Jihadists, and now we create pirates. Yo ho ho.
Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights. Your life, your existence, your interests and the product of your labor now belongs to the group. If the group needs a bailout, heath care, green cars, low mortgage rates, a job, an education—anything at all, it now becomes your responsibility to provide it, whether you want to or not.
You see it in both the redistributive legislation, which takes money from people who’ve earned it and give it to those who have not, along with the language itself. Phrases like “we’re all in it together”, “I am my brother’s keeper” and “shared sacrifice” boil down to the same frightening reality: You are here to serve. And unlike the charity of volunteerism, the “will of the people” is implemented by force, not by voluntary trade.
as Flannery O'Connor's 1963 essay called "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade." It concerned neither guns nor violence, neither cliques nor experimental approaches to the treatment of adolescent depression. It was about . . . books. In defending the teaching of the great works of the Western canon rather than those of the modern day (which kids far preferred), she said something wise, the sort of thing an adult might say. She said that the whims and preferences of children should always, always be sublimated to the sense and judgment of their elders.
A serious marathoner friend recently told me that she had leased 
Buffett tends to drive cars until the wheels fall off. His new one is a Chinese E-6. 
Like you care, right? The purpose is really to highlight a novel, 
IRS agents 
Author and