Maggie's Farm

Prost!

Mrs. BD found this good deal from our friends at Club ABC: 8 days in Prague and Budapest. They do a very good job making world travel possible for the non-weathy and for those who are willing to fly economy and maybe endure a stopover.

I've always been more of a Mediterranean and UK traveller, but the Holy Roman Empire is growing on me. It's probably just a phase.

You can make online reservations for music and opera tickets way in advance. She wants to see Janacek's Kat'a Kabanova at the Prague Opera (where Mozart first conducted Don Giovanni).

I have never been to Hungary. Mrs. BD wants to see Hungarian folk music and dance troupes, and try some of the historic coffee houses. Here's a nice Budapest restaurant. Looks just like I would expect:

Thank God that the commies are gone from Czecho and Hungary. Maybe Cuba will be next.

Amusingly, they do have a Hammer and Sickle Times tours in Budapest. Join us, Comrades and ex-Liberals:

Go back to the good old times to experience how life was when Big Brother ruled our every move, we drove Trabants, drank spirits at work, lived in block flats, stood in banana lines, had two passports, coupon books, no TV on Mondays and no freedom of speech! Written and raved about every year in major newspapers around the world, don't miss out on this bygone era.

They also have this more cheerful tour: Historical Revolution Walk. This one is about the good guys. 

Bog hockey. Ever play it? I did.

Columbia wins again: Few Schools Have a Solid Core Curriculum

Creepy vid: Al Gore's Baleful Brood

Villainous:

We have had government declare war on poverty and a war on drugs, but this is the first time our government has declared war on free enterprise.

Given the resounding success of the first two wars, I'd say that's the best news I've heard in ages.

New addition to ye olde blogroll: the profblog. See his Sarah Palin urges WHITES to vote for change

Teachers win, students lose, in DC.

However, Unions Struggling to Get Members to Rally Behind Dems. They'll figure it out: they plan on spending $100 million on these elections. That can buy something.

Is your money the government's money?

Tea Parties. It's how people organize themselves.

People migrate towards freedom. Vigorous folks want to be left alone.

The Republican Answer to George Soros's Money - Steven Law admires how the left organized itself during its wilderness years. Now he's got $50 million to help elect candidates on the right.

The Admin is bad for business. No kidding.

More Christie vs greedy unions. NY Post

Palin as the Leftwing Anti-Christ. So was Nixon, Reagan, Bush, etc. etc. Same old, same old.

Bailing out General Motors 20 months ago may have been a political payback. Duh.

It's a wonder to me that politicians and bozos like Michelle O know what foods are "good for us," while doctors have no idea. The notion of "healthy food" is religion, not science.

Thomas Sowell: The “Achievements” of the American Intelligentsia“- Intellectuals give people who have the handicap of poverty the further handicap of a sense of victimhood.”

Are American Universities Going the Way of General Motors?

Driscoll on 60s mythology: , “Jack Webb reached more people than Jimi Hendrix every week”

Barnes: GOP Nor’easter - Republicans storm Pennsylvania and beyond.

We have said this too. Clinton: Losing House Would Help Obama in 2012

The prix fixe 3 course lunches at Jean Georges, on Columbus Circle (1 Central Park West). $26/person. We ate in the "informal" section before going to the Freud-CS Lewis play down the street yesterday.

I have had lots of good food lately, but this is as good as it gets. Menu isn't all seafood, but plenty of it. I had the Tuna Tartare on avocado with radish and some kind of incredible tangy sauce, the broiled Cod with tomato-herb sauce, and the famous tiny molten chocolate cake. All perfect. Here are some reviews. Forgot my camera, but found the pic of his Bluefin Tartare on the web.

After the play, we took a little stroll through Central Park, which looks immaculate and is full of cheerful people. Despite Bloomberg's obnoxious nannyism, NYC is doing something right these days.

Don't pass it up on your next visit to NYC. Trust your Editor Bird Dog on this. If you try it and disagree, I'll pay for the lunch.

I found the whole of Peter Saunder's 2008 essay, Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul. 

It's a classic. The key quote:

Capitalism offers no grand vision of the future, for in an open market system the future is shaped not by the imposition of utopian blueprints, but by billions of people pursuing their own preferences.

Yep. Under control systems, people are forced to pursue the preferences of their supposed betters. I do not believe in "betters."

Some have asked my for my source for the Lectionary. There are many sources, but I use the Vanderbilt Divinity School's site, and I just pick my favorite of the moment. I would probably prefer using the King James, but I don't.

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1

8:18 My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.

8:19 Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land: "Is the LORD not in Zion? Is her King not in her?" ("Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?")

8:20 "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved."

8:21 For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.

8:22 Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?

9:1 O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!

We showed our dear friends around the Outer Cape (aka Lower Cape) last weekend, and I hope they got a sense of why it is enchanting to some of us. (They had a chance to look up some dead ancestors too.) We walked quite a bit, tooks lots of snaps, consumed quite a bit of seafood, ran into some interesting and friendly folks.

Re nomenclature, Wiki correctly notes:

The terms "Upper" and "Lower" as applied to the Cape have nothing to do with north and south. Instead, they derive from maritime convention at the time when the principal means of transportation involved watercraft, and the prevailing westerly winds meant that a boat with sails traveling northeast in Cape Cod Bay would have the wind at its back and thus be going downwind, while a craft sailing southwest would be going against the wind, or upwind. Similarly, on nearby Martha's Vineyard, "Up Island" still is the western section and "Down Island" is to the east, and in Maine, "Down East" is similarly defined by the winds and currents.

Over time, the reasons for the traditional nomenclature became unfamiliar and their meaning obscure. Late in the 1900s, new arrivals began calling towns from Eastham to Provincetown the "Outer Cape", yet another geographic descriptor which is still in use, as is the "Inner Cape."

Anyway, as I was saying, we love it because it is simple, a little bit wild and woolly, small-"d" democratic, and without pretension, fashion, or name-droppability. Even the wealth up there on the Outer Cape quietly adheres to the Yankee Code (and when they do not, they catch hell).

Lots of pics with commentary below the fold -

10 Job Search Mistakes You're Probably Making

LA: $111 million for 55 jobs. It should be a scandal.

The Tea Party has already won

Who loves ya, small business?

The limits of science. A quote:

Physicists, in particular, have long believed themselves to be on the verge of explaining almost everything. In 1894 Albert Michelson, the first American to get a Nobel prize in science, said that all the main laws and facts of physics had already been discovered. In 1928 Max Born, another Nobel prize-winner, said that physics would be completed in about six months’ time. In 1988, in his bestselling “A Brief History of Time”, the cosmologist Stephen Hawking wrote that “we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature.” Now, in the newly published “The Grand Design”, Hawking paints a picture of the universe that is “different…from the picture we might have painted just a decade or two ago”. In the long run, physicists are, no doubt, getting closer and closer to the truth. But you can never be sure when the long run has arrived. And in the short run—to adapt Keynes’s proverb—we are often all wrong. 

City Journal on charter school lotteries

AVI thinks about poverty. Before I even get to his considerations, I need to know who is in those stats, and how poverty is currently defined (for example, does it include the value of government benefits? I know it excludes assets, and only looks at income.). Does it include grad students with stipends and free housing? People with two cars? Women's Studies grads living at home who can't find a job? 19 year-old single moms with four kids? People who are temporarily out of work? People who work off the books? - (Who hasn't heard "I'll do it for $500, or $200 in cash"?). Maine potato or blueberry farmers with 200 acres? Chronic schizophrenics and the mentally disabled who can only work in sheltered situations? The creepy Goth gals with the tats and body-piercings who work part-time in the truck stops in St. Johnsbury and Lebanon NH and live with their boyfriends? Unemployed actors and dancers? Waiters in Colorado Springs who do not declare their tips?  Drug dealers who declare no income? The elderly living on Social Security? I mean, I know there is some poverty (and tons of programs to assist them), but who are they? And how much of it is elective in some sense, like my hippie Maine Guide who wants to follow his heart and doesn't give a damn about income? Or people who won't leave Michigan when there are jobs for them in Texas and Alabama? Money is not everybody's primary motivator, but I know there are tons of ambitious Americans looking hard for work right now in this crappy Obama economy. I just want to know who is in those stats.

Powerline on the politics of the stupid and obnoxious lightbulb ban

Castle seems to have felt entitled. Here's another sore loser. Grow up, people. Take your lumps, and go get a $1 million/yr lobbying job in DC if you don't like living in your home state. Or is it about a twisted desire for power?

What does Take Back America mean to you? For years, a common yard and barn sign in nothern Vermont has been "Take Back Vermont." (I don't think they took it back yet, and soon the posters of those signs will be dead. Dead and buried, ayup.)

Nice Magazine You’ve Got There, Mr. Forbes… Be a shame if something were to happen to it…

Blast From the Past: Could Facebook Destroy Your Marriage?

Quantum computers on the way

Prager: Why the Right Fears Transforming America -- and the Left Seeks It

Gov. Christie does it again (with the vid). He's a mensch. Not a metrosexual. Too real for politics...or maybe not.

Related: Ryan and Christie - the GOP's Dynamic Duo

Poverty rate at highest level in half-century, data show. They do not tell you how they define poverty, or whether their figures include government benefits.

NYT sees Tea Partiers as "furious" and "snarling." I'd term that pure projection.

From George Will's Trifle with the government? Just ask Jacob Maged:

The crime scene at 138 Griffith St. has changed in 76 years. Today it is a barber shop. In 1934, it was a tailoring and cleaning establishment owned and run by Jacob Maged, 49.

With his responsibilities as a father of four, Maged should have shunned a life of crime. Instead, he advertised his criminal activity with a placard in his shop window, promising to press men's suits for 35 cents. This he did, even though President Franklin Roosevelt's New Dealers, who knew an amazing number of things -- his economic aides were not called a "Brains Trust" for nothing -- knew that the proper price for pressing a man's suit was 40 cents...

OMG. Christine O'Donnell has had sex!

Bail out Studebaker!

Ace: Democrats To Run On Record of Genuine Accomplishment and Gaywad Logo But Mostly Gaywad Logo

Came in over the transom with the video:

The P51 was the most versatile fighter plane of WW2. It excelled at both ground level support of the troops and high altitude long range fighter cover for the heavy bombers. It was the equal of the best fighter  planes in dog fights. It was also an accident of fate or timing rather than planning that it existed. 

In late 1940 or early '41 Britain was desperately short of fighter planes of any sort and  had sent some RAF people to the US to see what they could buy.  Hoping for some P-40's they talked with Curtis Wright and found them booked up for the duration by the US govmt. They got a tip from Curtis Wright that North American Aviation had no contracts yet and was looking for business, and that Curtis Wright would licence North American to build P-40's if they worked out an agreement.  When the RAF asked the North American small management crew if they would  be interested their answer was Why do you wand to buy an expensive, high priced obsolete plane that would take well over a year to start any production when we have a new design worked out and can have a prototype ready for RAF test flights in 9 months if you can get us an engine for it from Allison. They were, they could and they did a deal and were very happy with the performance of the prototype, and placed a production order.

When this news worked its way through to the Army Air Force they decided to look into the possibilities and eventually ordered a production run that wound up as the A-36 low  level fighter. The Allison V12 was the only non-radial combat aircraft engine built in the USA and, unlike the Rolls Royce Merlin engine and the German ME bf109, it did not have a supercharger which was essential for combat above 15,000 ft as well as top performance at lower altitudes. After the RAF had a few month's experience with the new plane, the  RAF did the obvious thing and grafted a Rolls Royce Merlin engine from a Spitfire onto one of their "P-51's" (don't remember what the RAF called their version of the plane).  At this time the RAF got the North American crew on board the update and they soon found out that Packard Motor Company in the US was building Rolls Royce engines for the PT Boats of the Navy. Packard was happy to add Merlin egines for NA to their production runs and the P-51 was officially launched.

One of the benefits of NA being small and nearly broke was that the design engineers had to do double duty as production engineers so they designed the plane for simple and fast as well as low cost production. At that time the conventional practice was to build the airframe and then have people crawl inside to string all the wires and cables together, and this more than doubled the assembly time and cost. NA designed the fuselage in two half shells and had the electrical, hydraulic and control cables, etc installed in each half prior to sewing the halves together. The P-51 cost about one third the cost of the P-38 and about half the cost of the P-47 or F6F Navy planes.

The video here: http://www.asb.tv/videos/view.php?v=1bf99434&br=500 

Oktoberfest decolletage collage via Theo. Nice dirndls:

He has a new record, Mean Old Man. Still going strong, it seems, despite all of the ups and downs. An interview in the WSJ.

Stories from 97 Orchard St.

VDH: When Socialism Creeps In . . .

Andres: A misaligned presidency.

Stossel: Money Is Not What Schools Need. No, but it's what they want. A quote:

"Over the past 40 years," Coulson writes, "public school employment has risen 10 times faster than enrollment.  There are 9 percent more students today, but nearly twice as many public school employees."

Lies told to kids

WSJ: Union power and the Christie effect

The oyster farmers get out onto the mudflats at low tide, with their trucks and boats, to tend their oyster cages or to harvest the humble but tasty Wellfleet Oyster:

One of many vast Wellfleet salt marshes. These are happy homes for Diamondback Terrapins, on the northern edge of their range. I think they hunker down in the mud at low tide, then come out to feed on worms, crabs, and snails when the water comes back in. They never leave the water except to lay their eggs, and are rarely seen. Some Mallards and Black Ducks breed there, but you never see many ducks up there until winter, when the sea ducks come down from the north in large numbers - Eider, Old Squaw, and all of the Scoters.

Miles of "empty" beach. This is on Cape Cod Bay, roughly across from Plymouth. Endangered Piping Plovers breed along this stretch of beach. Montana is not the only place with big skies (but we do love Montana - been there many times).

The parlor of the place where we plant ourselves on Cape Cod. Tiny antique rooms, all with views of marsh and harbor.

One of my grandpas used to love to visit Cuba for vacation getaways. Cigars, cocktails, lovely women, and great sport fishing. Here's an idea of what Havana was like, before the Commies destroyed it. Prosperous, clean, lively, and free. Now it's a dump.

This footage ought to be enough to persuade even the most loony Lefty, especially since even the Castro brother thugs are walking back Socialism this week...but it won't.

At Pajamas: The Bridge: Bob Dylan, the ‘Ruling Class,’ and the ‘Country Class’

Retirement Fund Trillions Lure Government Grabbers

Mrs. O wants to reprogram your eating. Michelle O and Bloomberg should plan my menus. Definitely.

ENERGY CONSERVATION, LIKE TAXES, IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE

Intel CEO: Obama Doesn’t Understand Jobs or the Economy

More women than men got PhDs last year

FYI:

From Wind in the Willows (a book without which no child should be)

"Is it so nice as all that?" asked the mole, shyly...

"Nice? It's the only thing," said the Water Rat Solemnly, as he leaned forward for his stroke. "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats."

"Simply messing...about in boats -- or with boats... In or out of 'em it doesn't matter. Nothing seems to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not."

"Look here! If you've really nothing else on hand this morning, supposing we drop down the river together and have a long day of it?"

Photo is of Lightnings. Info and some links about that class here. Watched one flying past in Wellfleet Harbor, despite being loaded with 5 guys. I grew up racing that class, still love them because they double as comfortable little day-sailers. My late lamented uncle used to take his half-waterlogged wood Lightning out on a Saturday afternoon alone with his pipe and some beers, placidly contemplating life and enjoying toying with the fickle breezes. I am far from being an old guy, but I even sailed wooden Lightnings as a youth. Played lots of tennis with wooden racquets too. Jack Kramer Pro Staff was my favorite in that department.

Dan Debicella is moving up against the one-termer Dem in Ct's District 4. It's a race between a Conservative Repub and a Pelosi Dem.

Also in CT, McMahon moving up on Blumenthal.

Long shots in Blue CT? We'll see. It depends on who shows up to vote.

PDS: Is it "status anxiety" or simple politics? Tiger

Dr. Helen: How rich people think

Dalrymple: On the perils of postmodern moral reasoning

"If others want to defer adulthood until after a big portion of it has passed away, that’s their business."

Thad McCotter: Leftist Dogma’s 3 Core Conceits

The Anti-American President?

Lieberman Comes Out against Tax Hike 

Race and the modern Republican Party

Obama's America: Record Increase of People in Poverty, Blacks and Latinos Hardest Hit

Surber: “Political Correctness is silencing an important debate”

Obama and sex: The world is not a sexual allegory. It is not a fiction where copulation is the meaning of life.

From a commenter here: 'I've got about an hour to feel your pain, then I've got a tee time and a party at the White House with my pals. We're having lobster.'

What are the Dems running on this fall? And what are they running away from? Well, they are running away from Obama, climate change, healthcare, tax increases, and the economy. It's a tough year to be a Dem, unless you happen to be very popular locally.