Saturday, March 14. 2009
"I looked at my watch, I looked at my wrist.
I punched myself in the face with my fist.
I took my potatoes down to be mashed,
then I made it on over to that million dollar bash."
I thought the song was a bit of a spoof about Woodstock, but who knows? Dylan with The Band, on the Basement Tapes (which were just fooling-around practice tapes):
 Why did Lincoln pick Andrew Johnson?
Representation without taxation
Brussels Journal reports on this week's NYC climate conference. They begin:
More than six hundred scientists, economists, legislators, and journalists from around the world met in New York on March 8-10 for the second International Conference on Climate Change. Presentation after presentation documented the pseudoscience and dictatorial intentions behind the climate alarmism of the UN, EU, and Obama administration.
Read the whole thing.
Stocks that are never coming back.
Pride goeth before a fall in the polls.
Social status prudery. Overcoming Bias
How Radical is Obama? RWNH
The Myth of Relativism and the Cult of Tolerance. Anderson at American Thinker
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
G.K. Chesterton (h/t, Dr. Bob)
 My Last Duchess (1842)
That's my last duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will't please you sit and look at her? I said
"Fra Pandolf" by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
That depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 't was not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say "Her mantle laps
Over my lady's wrist too much" or "Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat:" such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart - how shall I say? - too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed: she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 't was all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace -all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush,at least. She thanked men - good! but thanked
Somehow - I know not how - as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech - (which I have not) - to make your will
Quite clear to such a one, and say, "Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss
Or there exceed the mark"- and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse
- E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will 't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count, your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting is my object. Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me.
Another Browning dramatic monologue. This poem is in every high school anthology, but it still knocks me out. The Duke of Ferrara speaks throughout, during his negotiations for his next marriage, and implies that he had his last duchess murdered, or put away. She was "made too soon glad." I think the "Notice Neptune" bit says it all.
Photo is a Theo duchess.
Friday, March 13. 2009
Toon above from Theo
Some people just want to see the world burn. Goldberg
Cockpit Chatter. Amusing.
Carefully calibrating your fear to accomplish their goals. And it's quite clear what those goals are.
James Lovelock: Anti-Green Ecologist and classic Brit crank/harmless lunatic. How does he get newspaper coverage? If every person who is a bit off in the world got news coverage...never mind.
Now yet another one. Oh, almost forgot. A second one today. (It's usually just one per day.) How many Dems are crooks and finaglers? Has this been studied yet?
The Constitution says we should redistribute wealth. But how often? Hourly? Daily? Monthly? Seems to me that people move in and out of money. Mostly out, lately.
Good old Yankee Pittsfield, where the cops confiscate semen
IPCC Update: We're all gonna drown. I don't care. I have a boat.
Only going to tax the rich - as long as you don't count everybody else
It's tough being a woman making $350,00/yr in a do-nothing job. Government can solve it.
I am all in favor of natural forest fires, but this lady is wacked
Psychology Abuse. Shrinkwrapped
Dang gun lobby won't stop killing people. Will no one stop them?
The Liberal Revolution: Come for the egalitarianism, stay for the bestiality and tyranny.
Photo below from a NYC health food (?) shop in NYC, borrowed from Conspiracy. Worth every penny, no doubt:
 Somebody told me this week that he was putting together a Team Penning team in New York State. Not only did I not understand how that Western game works, I never would have imagined that there are Team Penning classes and competitions throughout NYS, CT and MA.
Here's how the game is played. Sounds like good fun, a bit like billiards with horses and cattle. Or maybe more like Chinese Checkers?
Here's just one of the sponsors I found by Googling Team Penning New York.
Via Right Wing Prof:
"Since when is the secret ballot a basic tenet of democracy?" - Jimmy Hoffa
Thursday, March 12. 2009
 Adirondack fly fishing legend Fran Betters is ill, and asks for help in selling his shop and asks that, if you want one his hand-built rods, to buy one now. Been to his place a number of times over the years. Always in that chair, tying flies or building rods, with his wife in attendance. A crusty codger with a good heart.
Read his poignant letter at his site.
If you fish, buy something from the old fellow to help put his mind at ease. Even a few flies. Fran invented the famous Ausable Wulff. A good wet fly.
We should have been following this conference in NYC closely, but we can't do everything. Here's a dispatch from Reason, with this quote from Klaus' speech:
Klaus (also) warned that powerful rent-seeking groups were riding the global warming alarmism bandwagon all the way to the bank. Rent-seeking occurs when individuals, firms, or organizations attempt to make money by manipulating the regulatory environment rather than by trade and production. Klaus cited firms and non-governmental groups that plan to profit from carbon rationing in the form of emissions permits trading and by deploying highly subsidized solar and wind energy projects.
Watts Up has been following the conference. He also offers this toon:
Video of a studio rehearsal, with Mark Knopfler and his band. Again, no date or place. 70s for sure. It's a lovely tune:
Wednesday, March 11. 2009
Sippican does art.
Compromise, hell! That's what has happened to us all down the line -- and that's the very cause of our woes. If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?
Jesse Helms in 1959, as quoted at The Foundry
"If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay -- in solid cash -- the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy."
Aldous Huxley, as quoted at Overcoming Bias
Theo asks whether the advertising image above is demeaning to Italian women. I say NO! (that's Italian for "No"). I say it's art. Let's analyze the picture:
It's a compelling image, with the late Renaissance landscape in the background (the Garden of Eden, with Eve covering her private parts with pasta in her new-found shame? Or is the background the bleak, sterile desert of Western Capitalism?). The gal's hair and the dinner plate are obvious echoes of Botticelli's Venus. But why the cup of cappucino? Coffee with pasta? What exactly is the artist trying to say about gender, transexualism, race, power, veganism, consumerism, carbon trioxide or whatever, capitalism, spaghetti, and coffee? Or does she have some Barbera in the coffee cup? Wine or coffee - bloodthirsty Christian wine or peaceful, spiritual Moslem coffee? West vs. East? But assuming it's wine in the coffee cup, what's up with that? Is she a victim of Capitalism, too oppressed and impoverished by The System to afford clothing or a proper wine glass? Or is her nakedness a warning about the Crisis of Anthropolitical Capitalist Global Warming? Is there Christian meaning in that cup: "Take this cup. This is my blood..."? For sure, she is saying "Eat me (and drink this)", but in what way, exactly? And does the lady represent a blasphemous pomo version of the Holy Virgin - or a faithful representation of the whores sex workers to whom Christ ministered? Madonna or sex worker? Or maybe a female Christ? Is she saying "Drink of me" (a request for an oral, not a phallic interaction - as a critique of our phallus-dominated, warmongering culture)? Is the snake-like pasta a reference to Satan, or an echo of Laocoon and his Sons? Or both, a deft blending of pagan with Christian imagery? And how do the tensions of all of these dualities help us to interrogate the dangerous and discredited assumptions of Western Civilization?
(I can do this sort of BS all day long, without once mentioning that she's a hot and delicious Italiano babe. Our college readers are welcome to expand on this post for their Art History term papers. An "A" guaranteed from your crackpot pomo prof.)
Tuesday, March 10. 2009
 Experts are 90% certain that this is a life portrait of Shakespeare.
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things.
William Faulkner - The Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, December 10, 1950, quoted in Vanderleun's piece which we linked yesterday.
 This weekend, I plan to use this pot roast recipe with a venison rump I have in the freezer. I wonder how it would work for shoulder too. I have one of those in the freezer. No, two shoulders.
There's always a navarin like this for the shoulder meat.
Monday, March 9. 2009
The case that the Western World has gone mad, that our elite leaders are fools, and that we live in a lunatic asylum. From Part 9 of From Meccania to Atlantis in The Brussels Journal:
The asylum’s restraining device, a chain and ball, is made of paper. The United States Federal Tax Code takes up 67,024 pages. The Federal Register, i.e. government rules and regulations, takes up 78,000 pages. These 145,000 pages, weighing about 730 kg, are just the nucleus of the crushing grid within which the American citizen has to try to go about his daily life. In addition, there are tens of thousands pages more of tax codes and sundry regulations in each of the 50 states. In addition, each spending bill with which U.S. Congress further destroys the country and debauches its money, is over 1,000 pages long and rarely read by the people who vote on it.
In Europe, there were 80,000 pages of EU laws and regulations in 2005, 90,000 in 2006, and probably at least 100,000 now. Combined with the legal and tax code of each country, the EU citizen conducts his life with well over a ton of paper hanging from his neck.
To quantify the measure of the insanity further, it suffices to grasp that the outstanding nominal value of global swaps and derivatives at the end of 2008 was $531.2 trillion. Estimated Gross World Product in 2008 was $70.65 trillion.
We have therefore in our asylum inmates on the upper financial floor, hanging beyond the parapet with all of us in tow, unspooling toilet paper that they swear is worth 7.5 times the total value of all the goods and services produced on Planet Earth. And all of the West’s governments were blind as this was building up over many years, busying themselves instead with breaking their White subjects’ resistance to being governed by green pacifist lesbians or being invaded by over-100 million Muslims, Aztecs, and other assorted redeemers of the Euro peoples’ inexcusably Euro civilization.
It just may be that in the course of human events, it’s the lot of this generation to stand up and walk out of the theater of madness.
O Magnum Mysterium. Listen to the music.
Sunday, March 8. 2009
 Horse domestication moved back 1000 years. Yet they are just as stupid as they ever were. Moron animals that will get you killed on them.
The Davis Cup, with Moslems. I didn't know that Moslems were big tennis fans.
Still forbidden at the NYT: The T Word
More on CT's attack on the RC Church
Jules uses the A Word. Rightly so.
Bloomberg defends the rich
Even Letterman making fun of Al Gore now. His insanity is not my fault. Blame the Supreme Court.
Bad, good; good, bad; and bad, bad. VDH
A great source of advice: A biz that makes no money. Cool, dude.
What is the CDS market telling us?
It was an insult, but nobody realized it except us.
Chavez to Obama: Wash your ass. Why can't the Socialists just get along?
Brits urged to stop visiting Disney World. That is good advice, but the rest of it is pure BS: Alas, the Brit footprint on the world gets smaller every day.
Book him, Dano
Is Obama lazy? Or is he overwhelmed?
CT goes to war against the RC Church
Our blog friend Prof Bainbridge is always re-working his site, but this is a complete change.
Nyquist: Why not the truth? "The truth will set you free. But freedom signifies responsibility, and who wants to be responsible? Ignorance, after all, is bliss – and bears no responsibility whatsoever. The most common excuse in any language is, “I didn’t know.” ?
Moral bankruptcy. Megan McArdle doesnt want to pay her Home depot bill
Harvard climate scientist Willie Soon: It's the sun, stupid. Related: Alternative Energy is a joke. Reality will rule, eventually.
Dems have doubled Rush Limbaugh's audience. Related: Samples of Rush's hate speech. Speaking about freedom and opportunity and human potential is hateful, right? Of course it is.
The triumph of the Fabians in England, and what we face today
Volker: Bring back Glass-Steagall
Obama keeps looking for enemies
Plenty of opposition to cap and trade
Overtures to Cuba
More on the teleprompter story
It was terrible when Bush wanted to do it, but it's OK for Obama to de-list the Gray wolf
A re-post from 2007 -
 The post about Beantown food yesterday, with the link to Sissy Willis' baked bean recipe, put me to thinking about some of my favorite fall and winter foods. I guess spending yesterday afternoon getting a couple of loads of firewood with a friend's truck helped.
Johnnycakes, or Cornmeal pancakes, or these. You can do them with or without flour in the mix. I like to add a can of canned or frozen corn to the batter: it's one of the very few valid uses of canned corn.
(In fact, corn is a nice addition to regular pancake batter too. Give it a try. Of course, cranberries are great in pancakes. Their tartness adds a lot of zip to a dull pancake.)
Indian Pudding. It's what was called "Hasty Pudding," but made with corn meal, and cooked slowly - never hastily. A little ice cream or drizzled heavy cream on top.
Why is Boston called Beantown? It's because of the triangular trade. Here's a Durgin-Park recipe. Really good with black bread. Heck, I even like baked beans from the can. Our reader reminds us that, in the old days, beans or peas in the pot were termed "Pease Porridge."
I'll do Yankee apple desserts in another post.
 Thanks to Gwynnie, I am entirely absorbed by Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World.
The war of Islam against the West must be the longest war in history. During this era, it was the remarkable Sulieman the Magnificent.
 Pruning is a subject of great interest to us, as it is to all gardeners. It is now the last chance to do our winter pruning of those late-blooming shrubs and trees which bloom on new growth.
This site from Texas A&M is an excellent pruning overview, with special attention to the pruning requirements of Crepe Myrtle.
Shrubs which are pruned wrong offend my delicate gardening sensibilities.
Photo: One of my young Crepe Myrtles blooming a couple of Augusts ago. Up here in Yankeeland, north of their growing zone, they have a small chance of thriving if they are a hardy variety, and are well-sheltered and well-mulched for the winter. Mine do just fine. While they are commonplace in the South, up here nobody seems to know what they are.
As with hybrid Rhodadendrons and azaleas, it's an iffy proposition up here - but well-worth when it works.
8:31 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
8:32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
8:33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."
8:34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
8:35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.
8:36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?
8:37 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?
8:38 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."
Saturday, March 7. 2009
From Stuart Taylor (h/t, Insty). He begins:
Having praised President Obama's job performance in two recent columns, it is with regret that I now worry that he may be deepening what looks more and more like a depression and may engineer so much spending, debt, and government control of the economy as to leave most Americans permanently less prosperous and less free.
Other Obama-admiring centrists have expressed similar concerns. Like them, I would like to be proved wrong. After all, if this president fails, who will revive our economy? And when? And what kind of America will our children inherit?
Read the whole thing.
|
