Maggie's Farm

The New Criterion discusses the current (through January) Hopper show at the National Gallery of Art.

 That is Nighthawks. Here's a good Hopper site.

"Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale, and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled or hanged." 

President Abraham Lincoln 

Where the heck did this idea of a noose being a symbol for racism come from? To me, nooses always made me think of horse thieves and cattle rustlers, and hangin' judges out West. Frontier justice. Well, also of Nathan Hale, who gave his life for the cause of freedom.

I fully agree with the piece at Never Yet Melted that it is a newly-minted pseudo-symbol in the wake of the Jena scam, which he also discusses, as we did earlier today. A diversion from that embarassment, and a wholly disingenuous one.

Does anyone really believe "the offended" anymore? Nowadays, everybody wants to pose as "offended" or "abused." It's pitiful to proclaim that one sits on a pity pot, but society seems to give you more points for being pitiful than for being cheerful, resilient, and relatively productive in life. Cry-babies are emotional blackmailers.

I am deeply offended by "the offended" and by the semi-professionally offended, but, despite my offended status, nobody is pandering to me, giving me free stuff, or offering me a pass on my sins. Boo hoo.

Disregarding the truth, people are now going nuts about nooses: Free Speech Left Hanging - NY Post.

Let's keep nooses around, without inventing one more phony subject that everybody is supposed to try to look virtuous and sensitive about, and to tiptoe around. The noose worked just fine on Saddam, and Osama would look very handsome in one.

I wonder whether all of this just pre-Halloween, Haunted House craziness. (And, speaking of crazy, how many other blogs have "noose" and moose in their front page post titles at the same time? Not to mention Techno-Viking.)

The new bio of Dante by Barbara Reynolds is reviewed at Claremont: Between Riddle and Revelation.

Was Dante a mystic? 

Image: Giotto's portrait of the immortal Dante.

Raven is a heck of a photographer. This is Smuggler's Notch yesterday:

 Take a look at the rest of her leaf photos.

Tom Brewton quotes Derek Bok in a piece on Sowell on Education - Substance vs. Perception:

...former Harvard University President Derek Bok wrote, Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems.

Black and white is still the right thing for true photographs.

Thanks to David Thompson for finding some Paul McDonough photo links. I can remember when he was a lowly NYC "street photographer."

French accuse Dutch of "unacceptable cowardice."

The French economic decline. Yanks and Brits buying up their countryside.

Animal fats are good for you. 

And government anti-obesity programs don't work (duh). Teacher, leave them kids alone. Every classroom needs a fat kid to make fun of.

Re-posted: I still get a good giggle out of Weird Al's White and Nurdy. Nurds are who make everything in the world run - including blogs - while the rest just benefit from it all and take it for granted.

Entitlement creep isn't a law of nature - it's a leftist strategy. The original big error was not means-testing Social Security.

Steyn makes the case that ideas like expanding SCHIP to the middle class is the worst thing we can do "for the children." 

One quote:

 I’m in favor of tax credits for child health care, and Health Savings Accounts for adults, and any other reform that emphasizes the citizen’s responsibility to himself and his dependents. But middle-class entitlement creep would be wrong even if was affordable, even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover it every month: it turns free-born citizens into enervated wards of the Nanny State. As Gerald Ford likes to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” But there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. As I point out in my book, nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: Once a fellow’s enjoying the fruits of Euro-style entitlements, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and who cares if it’s going to bankrupt the state a generation hence?

That’s the real “war on children”: in Europe, it’s killing their future. Don’t make the same mistake here.

More from the Steyn editorial at Flopping

AOL is so yesterday.

Our blogmeister Chris, who says that AOL does not recognize any of the technical conventions of the 2007 internet. (I still use it, with great annoyance, due to long-established habit.)

A Jacksonian makes a detailed case for the sociopathy of the Clintons.

The fact that the details become tedious is because the pattern is so consistent.

Related: Has the silence begun to crack that they hang out with crooks, grifters, and scammers?

I am fairly certain we are back up and running properly. Thanks to Chris for taking care of the problems - I know it was a major hassle. Here's a snap from the Berkshires today. That's a Sugar Maple:

Reposted from August, 2005

The Search for Alec Guiness

What are your favorite roles? The Horse's Mouth, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and of course, George Smiley (Tinker, Tailor is the best made for TV movie ever made, bar none - a masterpiece), are mine. Oh, also, Bridge Over the River Kwai. But who was he?

Piers Paul Reid's authorized biography is out, and it doesn't seem to answer the question. From the Boston Globe's review:

Piers Paul Read, a friend of Guinness's, was asked by the actor's widow to write this book, which is, in part, an assiduous record of the signal events and experiences in Guinness's life and career. There is the drunken, mendacious, cadging mother -- the great scourge of his life; the putative, though not positive, father paying for his support and education; the cruel stepfather; acting lessons with a stage legend who believed him to be one of the real Guinnesses; his debt to John Gielgud as a patron; courtship and marriage; wartime in the Royal Navy; and a recounting of his subsequent stage, movie, and TV career. All this is embedded in a stifling quantity of routine business on the lines of guest lists and restaurant expenses. Here we feel the authorized biographer's weary duty to comprehensiveness and his reluctance or inability to apply a shaping hand.

Read entire.

Reposted from 2005

A dog's view: It's seared - seared in my cultural-bio-psycho-social memory, just like Jung meant. Remember the George Papoon campaign? As I lie here on the kitchen floor, hoping some cherrries will fall off the plate, I am remembering that glorious "One Organism - One Vote"  campaign.

"Papoon for President - Not Insane"

We animals and other organisms lost that election, but it was a wonderful time back in 1970. The voting machines were designed to exclude and to discourage one-celled animals from voting. Gosh, Uncle Steve Post and those guys on WBAI....great stuff. A Revolution that failed. You human gods would be lying on the kitchen floor, being fed dry cardboard kibbles for supper, and we dogs would be going to work all dressed-up like dandies - wow - I mean bow-wow - and running the country. We figured that Papoon would get the massive bacteria and amoeba votes and that would turn the whole country into Greenish-Brown-Pond-Scum-colored states. Plus, if we were short a few votes, they could all just divide, and double their vote.

It's all from The Firesign Theater.

(By the way, can you name that breed in the photo?)

Luke 9, 18-27

18And it came to pass, as he was alone praying, his disciples were with him: and he asked them, saying, Whom say the people that I am?

 19They answering said, John the Baptist; but some say, Elias; and others say, that one of the old prophets is risen again.

 20He said unto them, But whom say ye that I am? Peter answering said, The Christ of God.

 21And he straitly charged them, and commanded them to tell no man that thing;

 22Saying, The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be slain, and be raised the third day.

 23And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.

 24For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.

 25For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?

 26For whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he shall come in his own glory, and in his Father's, and of the holy angels.

 27But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God.