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.
Chesterton’s success would have been hard to predict. He was the opposite of precocious. He didn’t learn to read until his ninth year (but after that he was unstoppable). His performance at lower school was lackluster. One schoolmaster exclaimed in exasperation that “if we could open your head we should not find any brain but only a lump of white fat.” Chesterton began to blossom at St. Paul’s (whose notable alumni include Milton, Pepys, and Judge Jeffries), where he met and befriended E. C. Bentley, the creator of the Clerihew, a form Chesterton would have been proud to invent.
After St. Paul’s, Chesterton first contemplated a career in art. For a couple of years, he dabbled in classes at the Slade while also attending lectures in English, French, and Latin at University College, London. He took no degree. And art turned out to be an entrée, an avocation, not an end. He went on to entertain friends with his drawings. But his main revelation concerned criticism. Years later, Chesterton recalled that, “having failed to learn how to draw or paint, I tossed off easily enough some criticisms of the weaker points of Rubens or the misdirected talents of Tintoretto. I had discovered the easiest of all professions; which I have pursued ever since.”
His wife was phobic about sex. That is probably why he got so fat.
To this day, there are baby boomers who half believe that “sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three,” as Philip Larkin had it, “between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.”
This, from Sleeper, seemed relevant to the article:
Our friend Sipp got me back to studying American architectural styles. I realized that I had been making a rookie error by referring to some houses as "Victorian" which may have been Victorian-era but were, in fact, correctly identified as "Colonial Revival."
In the area where I live, the vast majority of the gracious houses built after 1890 are Colonial Revival. Many of them were built as summer, weekend, or "country" houses. Pre-war and pre-income tax, ordinary comfortable people could do much more than they can today.
What style is this house (my pic in Newport, RI last summer - not a rich guy's house but a pre-income tax middle-class house)?:
Follow-up: Many readers fooled by those rocket ships - and the white paint on the shingles or whatever it is sided with now. My expert tells me it's actually Shingle-Style and not Queen Anne. It would look better with natural cedar shingles, would it not?
Darn pleasant home, regardless, and in a fun town, especially for boaters and barflies. Boat drinks!
A couple of days ago, Rick used the term 'Black Swan Event' in the comments so I asked him to expound on it. Here's his report.
The term 'Black Swan Event' entered our lexicon recently, but the idea has been in existence for many years. It has Latin roots, from a phrase that described 'a rare bird in the lands, and very like a black swan'. This was common saying, at a time when black swans had not been discovered. Upon its discovery in 1697, the black swan ceased to be a impossible thing, and became one which was improbable yet capable of being rationalized and institutionalized after its discovery, as if it should’ve been expected.
Today, the most commonly cited Black Swan Event is 9/11. It was one which was not easily seen or predicted, and considered impossible or at least improbable. Yet, in happening, history has been re-analyzed. Writers have spent a tremendous amount of time reviewing data prior to 9/11 which point to some big event occurring. In doing so, this work makes the event seem not only highly probable, but so likely that it could have been prevented, thereby institutionalizing many aspects of it in new behaviors. Since 9/11, other events have occurred which have been described as 'Black Swans', but may not meet the criteria. As a result, there is a tendency to overemphasize the impact of smaller events by journalists, as the logic of the improbable is sensationalized.
Among the people we tend to dine with, nobody ever orders a dessert.
I am one to enjoy good stinky cheeses with a sliced pear after a dinner, or maybe a tiny bowl of fruit with some creme fraiche, but if nobody is ordering anything except coffee, you hate to be the only one still greedily munching.
Dessert seems to have become a special treat in America, only for special occasions. Nobody wants to act like, or look like, a pig at the trough.
Trust is a fascinating topic mingling, as it does, personality tendencies (especially extent of projection of one's own evil impulses and thoughts) with cultural or subcultural norms and rational expectations. There are trust cultures and distrust cultures.
Life has slowly taught me to be less trusting than I am naturally inclined to be, given my cocooned upbringing. I am most trusting, rightly or wrongly, of my own sort of people amongst whom, on the whole, there are strict and agreed-upon codes of behavior.
I counted. There were 77 cars at my local gym this morning at 6:10 AM. Clearly, from the visible sweat, many people had been there since opening time, 5:00 AM.
Many Americans devote much energy into obtaining work where one can sit all day with no heavy lifting, and then get up early, renouncing wholesome morning sex or slumber to engage in unprofitable labor and exertion in the high-tech gyms. Do people do this in other countries? Are we insane?
About half the people at this place arrive in the morning with their work clothes or dress clothes in hand, on hangers. I see friends and neighbors every time I go.
What am I doing there? Mrs. BD insists that I remain vigorous. I love manual labor and playing sports, but I hate exercise. I am not overweight at all, so that's not an issue. Well, maybe 5 or 6 pounds. I can do heavy labor and tennis all weekend, happily, although happiest with my butt on a metal tractor seat with a cold one in my paws. On second thought, maybe happiest busting brush with dog and gun in Maine, Canada, or the Adirondacks. I dunno. Lots of things please me. Skiing too.
The sedentary work week is the issue, same as for bus drivers. Use it or lose it. That's my mantra, for now.
I would like it better if they had Teaching Company on the TVs instead of the FOX business channel.
We don't post much about interior decorating here, but we do post about things we learn about.
Since the lad and his bride are moving into a new place, I thought I'd re-post these useful tips as I attempt to supply them with oriental rugs from my stash.
I did the research. For a plain wall or over a table, etc, your main picture should be hung so the center of the picture is 57" from the floor. In other words, eyeball height for a slightly short person. 57" is known as "gallery height." It feels right and it looks right, but it can be lower in a seating area.
People tend to hang 'em too high, and it feels awkwardly unbalanced and looks a little silly.
Obviously there are all sorts of special situations - mantles, staircases, massed images, castle walls, giganto modern oils, etc. Years ago, when we needed a decorator's help with some rooms, he taught us that it's good to hang some pictures low, at seated-eyeball height in seating areas.
I recently re-hung some pics like this on the right, in the Farm HQ, and it feels right to me. The David Maass woodcock print is centered at about 57", and the two smaller hunting prints are obviously lower, at seated-eyeball height.
Within days of the attacks, a friend coolly informed me, "the people in the Twin Towers deserved it." Still reeling from that shock, I almost lost it when another friend admiringly compared bin Laden to George Washington. Soon thereafter, a well-known academic in my circle complained that the sudden outpouring of patriotism made her sick.
This utter madness, which I thought would be confined to the fringe, rapidly spread to every corner of elite society. The more we learned about the savagery of the Islamist world, the more our moral and cultural superiors turned their wrath on us, instead of the enemy.
As headlines blared the almost surrealistic brutality of Al Qaeda, Senator Patty Murray told a group of high school honor students that Osama bin Laden was popular in poor countries because he paid for day care centers. "We haven't done that," Murray said. "How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?"
At the risk of sounding insensitive, I always thought the idea of an elaborate 9-11 Memorial was wrong. I always thought what it required would be a plaque on the wall of some new buildings: "On this site, on September 11, 2001, 2700 Americans died in an attack by Moslem Jihadists." Perhaps a statue on a square. NYC is all about survival, endurance, optimism.
I feel this way for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that, in a sense, it elevates our enemies. I say this while having personal connections with a number people immediately touched by the attack.
The people I know who lost family and friends in the attack have their own personal memories and rituals, and little need for canned public display. Steyn might agree with me, but I'm not sure.
My own memory/memorial is seeing the jumpers live on TV. It is an indelible nightmare memory. A friend of mine saw them there and then. He at first thought it was material falling from the first building.
Bush said it: "Evil is real. Courage is real." We all know that.
...the sentimental idea that the intellectual differences between children are not real - or that they are real, but too upsetting to acknowledge - has taken hold of the popular imagination, whereas once such nonsense could only have been believed by a sociologist.
My son went to one of the comprehensives that replaced academically selective grammar schools. He is now studying law at university. Since he was likely to be correct about which of his peers would have passed and failed the eleven-plus had it still existed, I asked him if any of the likely failures had gone on to do surprisingly well under the comprehensive system.
Not one. I then asked if any of those whom he would have expected to pass the eleven-plus had gone on to do less well than he would have expected.
Several.
And then of course there is the question of the content of the education, even for those who “do well”. My son would be quick to acknowledge that he is an academic success but that he knows virtually nothing of British or European literature prior to the twentieth century. Indeed, he knows little of British or European history, even including the twentieth century. He knows nothing of the Bible, or the Christian tradition. Luckily, he is genuinely intelligent, and has a magpie-like gift for intellectual theft, seeing much of an idea from even the tiniest stolen morsel.
Read the whole thing. It's about "enforced compassion" and egalitarian ideology.
It's a better name for this wonderful business. Go onto their site and have them mail you their catalogues. It is a wholesome addiction.
Heather MacDonald has a good piece on the company at City Journal. They are making money. Wow - for-profit education. I actually had the idea of doing that before The Teaching Company existed. There's a big difference between idle dreamers and effective entrepreneurs, ain't there?
We use them often, but tend towards the courses on sale. If you go through ten or so of their courses, randomly-selected, you'll probably know more than the average recent college grad today.
The distinguished publisher of The Rumford Meteor has gone Hunter Thompson, or Carl Hiassen, or Rupert Murdoch, or The Onion, or something like that.
If Maine is Lake Wobegon on meth and welfare, this online newspaper captures the local ambience with, dare I say it, wit and wisdom.
Not only that, it's all pure fact. No wonder everybody in the Statehouse in Augusta (where's that?) reads it. And if Maine has any remaining local journalists, I'm sure they read it too.
It's a slice of America, and Mr. Sullivan has, I think rightly, recognized that colorful local online news is part of the future of journalism as the dead tree approach dies its slow death. Only problem: do people in Maine have internets?
How does one market a new online local (ie statewide) newspaper? Rent a billboard? Where?
Academia seems torn between utter decadence and Spanish Inquisition-like puritanism. Peter Wood discusses Higher Sex Ed:
Educate about “sexual harassment and sexual violence” on one hand, and promote sexual license and vulgarity on the other hand? This may not be a complete contradiction, but it is pretty close to one. License and restraint are awkward partners. Campus culture currently decrees that we should want both: It decrees that we should strive to liberate students from conventional morality in favor of free-wheeling sexual expression, while at same time we should instill an ethic of male restraint hedged by severe penalties.
Containing one's sexual and romantic impulses is one of the more difficult things that adult humans are called upon to do in civilized life. Academia reflects that human challenge in warning guys never to touch a girl on their way to their exciting Porn and Perversion Studies class.
Dalio is predicting that heavily indebted countries, including the US, will have to print money to deal with their debts, leading to a collapse in their currency and bond markets, and that late 2012 and 2013 will be another very difficult period. So be warned.
"Another difficult period"? What about now? He is usually right about things, it would seem. He is telling us that he is betting on that.
Trying to organize my personal photo philes, and finding fun trip pics. Riche in life but not in money, unlike the Duc de Berry who got to live off his peasants... Screw the money. Carpe diem. That's the modern way. Put it on a credit card. Obama will pay it.
My family skis. My kids are wonderful skiers, but I just alternate between reckless and timid, and have accumulated a couple of permanent ski injuries. Glad to have them, in a way, though. It's worth it for the cheap expensive thrills.
These folks want white people exterminated (h/t Moonbattery.) That's downright mean - and not multi-cultural at all.
Given the hardships and injustices of their slave ancestors, American descendants of Africans should thank their lucky stars that they ended up being born in America instead of the violent, corrupt, crappy AIDS-ridden place that most of Africa is today. Heck, I am grateful that my ancestors were driven away from England by government edicts, and England isn't all that bad even though it's getting worse and worse.
The following excerpts will give you a taste of the book:
Coffee: "For the most part, white people love Starbucks, although they will profess to hate how the chain is now a multi international corporation."
Organic food: "Because of the balance of global wealth and power, there is a general assumption that white people are pretty shrewd. And for the most part, history has proven this to be true. But white people have one great weakness: organic food."
Having black friends: "...an abundance of black friends (defined in white culture as two) also enables a white person to be the resident expert on African-American issues when there are no black people around."
Multilingual child: All white people their children to speak another language. There are no exceptions."
Dinner Parties: Outside of dictatorships and a few murder trials, there might not be a more rigorous judgement process in the modern world."
I love that the bio on the back cover includes the fact that he is a Ph.D dropout.
If you were born pinkish and peruse that book, you will realize how much of your life is a cultural cliche. Ouch. (Sorry - forgot how to write an accent aigue)
And if such racist white-haters have one drop of "diversity" in their hearts, they might benefit from Brookhiser's classic The Way of the Wasp. We WASPs need understanding, tolerance, and acceptance just like everybody else. We're a minority, ya know. Or almost one. Most of my ancestors were serfs, but serfdom and service to the State and the Lords is not my cup of meat.
Honestly, I am so sick of race. It is just plain stupid. I am part American Indian. Nobody cares about race anymore except the race-mongers and the race-hustlers and college admissions offices. It's pathetic.
Anyway, between those two cultural treatises I linked, those angry black people would discover that white folks lead lives of cliche at least as much as they do themselves. Sheesh. I thought racial hatred and anger were out of fashion in the Obama era.
Last year, at the invitation of Family Security Matters, I penned a reflection on 9/11 that focused on my experience with the first 10-years of my son’s life, 9/11 With My Son. This year I told the editor I had nothing to add. However, I do, but rather from others.
My son Jason, now 11, has the habit of taking a subject that interests him and applying himself to becoming the world’s greatest expert. He did that with the Titanic, and then the Harry Potter series, and now with 9/11. The underlying theme seems to be the magnitude of the events and their impacts. The sinking of the Titanic belied the security of technology in the face of a natural iceberg. The unfolding of Harry Potter’s adventures belied the safe childhood we parents struggle to create as children face supernatural evil. 9/11 combines these elements. 9/11 belies the security that we thought insulated America from the bloodthirsty hatred rising to pure evil that we thought only happened remotely in a disconnected elsewhere.
Several prominent blogs have featured links to an essay in the New York Times by Edward Rothstein, Amid the Memorials, Ambiguity and Ambivalence. Instead of our media and the cultural elites it celebrates being confused or even searching for American guilt, Rothstein suggests, “a Sept. 11 commemoration might well be a celebration of democratic culture’s enduring presence.” John Podhoretz at Commentary’s Contentions blog calls Rothstein’s essay, “The most important essay you’re likely to read this week,” for its critique of “the conversion of 9/11 from an act of wanton destruction and murder to a moment requiring an examination of our own sins.”
Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion, celebrates its 30th anniversary by offering an essay that delves deeper that Rothstein’s restricted newspaper word count. In this, Roger Kimball’s New Criterion exhibits its unique value. As Roger Kimball writes in his introductionto the 30th Anniversary Issue,
We have endeavored to provide a home for vigorously written cultural criticism while also building an institution of critical dissent. The two go together. At a time when culture and intellectual life are everywhere beholden to the imperatives of political correctness, even insisting on clear prose seems a daring provocation….Similarly, simply telling the truth about a whole host of controversial subjects is regarded as a challenge to the reigning pieties of established opinion.
Michael Lewis leads off the New Criterion September issue with America resumed: 9/11 remembered, The first entry in its series "Future tense: the lessons of culture in an age of upheaval." Lewis explores the whys behind the cultural confusion that Rothstein highlights. One must, must, read it all, for its exploration of how America’s arts have failed to capture the transformative lessons of 9/11. Some excerpts:
[T]he most vital cultural legacy of any war—or any great national trauma, for that matter—is intangible. It is the comprehensive way it changes our shared attitudes and assumptions, our collective sensibility. Changes in the collective sensibility, being invisible, usually do not reveal themselves until they are expressed in action…. Questions of art and culture seldom are directly involved in a national trauma; they belong to the shadow realm in which great events are digested and replayed after the fact, much as a dream imaginatively rehearses the happenings of the day….
Admittedly, the September 11 Memorial helps give focus and voice to the nation’s sorrow. But sorrow is only one tone in the spacious emotional register of a nation, and there are others, such as resolution, defiance, and even fury, that at certain times might be more appropriate. A person who could grieve but not snarl or even bite would be a strangely limited creature, and the same is true of a nation. Yet, after September 11, the public was given copious outlets only for its sorrow and none at all for its fury. (One must make the necessary exception for country and western music.).
When it came to addressing the harder and more fiery sentiments of the public, the cultural apparatus acted as bridle rather than spur, and rather nervously at that. Anything that might serve to focus national rage, such as showing films of the burning towers and plunging victims, was swept from the airwaves after a few days, only to be shown in short, carefully edited passages during the occasional anniversary broadcast or documentary. This was rationalized as a measure to spare bereft family members further grief, but it is much more the sense that such imagery was deemed incendiary, and likely to stoke the flames of public wrath, as if the most urgent danger—and the only danger—facing America was the prospect of mass mob violence against American Muslims….
The buildings and institutions that were targeted on that day were chosen as symbols of American national identity; those who were murdered were not collateral casualties but were killed in their capacity as Americans. The entire framework of the attack was a deliberate and focused assault on those objects that stood for the American government and American capitalism… But if the context of the event was explicitly American, this was precisely the terrain on which the arbiters of American culture—at least a substantial faction—felt themselves uneasy. Feelings of national solidarity, the sense of personal participation in the fate of one’s nation-state, have so long been disparaged as jingoism that even those artists who felt unaccountable patriotic stirrings found themselves utterly unable to make artistic use of them.
When one comes eyeball to eyeball with a shocking and malignant truth, but is unable to speak frankly and openly about it because of a taboo, one must resort to distortion, evasion, and self-deception….
Yet another lesson of culture after September 11 is that one must not fret or mope. This is hardly the first time that a sizable branch of the cultural establishment has failed to draw the appropriate lessons from new events. Yesterday’s radicals become today’s purveyors of the conventional wisdom and tomorrow’s sclerotic academicians….
Those revelations, administered in the most brutal manner conceivable, have reshaped the collective consciousness of the nation. But they have done so with very little help from art, which through the ages has been the most effective instrument for focusing the cultural consciousness, for framing its questions and concerns in the lucid terms without which no national conversation is possible…. But it is also because of a taboo, imposed gradually and imperceptibly over the past few decades, about expressing strong emotions in national terms—other than that of grief. This offers more concern, for a culture that cannot express, and make sense out of, the longings and passions of the people that sustains that culture cannot remain vital….
Last year, my son Jason offered this comment on what he’s learned from 9/11: “I’m glad the US has people who will fight so another 9/11 or worse doesn’t happen again.” This year, Jason adds: “There are heroes who help others escape. There are greater heroes who rise up regardless of dangers, as the police and firefighters did in the Towers.” Jason adds, "Screw al-Quaida." My son watches and listens to all the cultural detritus on TV and radio. Despite the best worst efforts of the profiting cretins he is exposed to, my son Jason’s quest to understand the facts of disasters and the best of people has independently led him to the conclusions that Rothstein and Lewis bemoan our cultural elites avoiding.
As long as there are Americans growing up like my son, and those like Rothstein, Kimball and Lewis helping to straighten out the confusions of their parents, our fears may be overblown and our hopes encouraged.
1950: Your honor, the defendant just snapped and killed three people. 2010: Your honor, I'm innocent, I just snapped and killed three people.
I'm hard-pressed to come up with any segment of the population that doesn't have a pre-medieval answer ready to be trotted out, at flight-deck-McGlaughlin Group volume, for any social ill or misbehavior, and a ready-made template to call any productive behavior a crime, too. There's isn't a dime's bit of difference between Pat Robertson or Al Gore in these matters. (A)Gay people or (B)Ford Explorers cause hurricanes. Take your pick, but there's no (C)
Our ignorance is truly staggering. According to some estimates, 95 percent of organisms in the soil alone are unknown to science. Many of them labor unseen, in the dark, serving as the churning stomachs of our planet, digesting dead plants and animals and, in the process, enriching the earth we depend upon for food and fiber. Other organisms expel their gaseous waste — a precious resource known as oxygen —to create the atmosphere that supports and sweetens the earth with such glorious creatures as toucans and manta rays and blue morpho butterflies, not to mention writers and academics. Some bacteria are even thought to contribute to the formation of clouds.
And from New Scientist, A field guide to bullshit: How do people defend their beliefs in bizarre conspiracy theories or the power of crystals? Philosopher Stephen Law has tips for spotting their strategies -
Perhaps the 21st century will "belong to China and India", as many suggest. But the US has been written off many times before. The global industries that have done well in the past decade - particularly those in the digital economy - seem to reward risk-takers, iconoclasts and creative thinkers. For better or worse, the US is better known for those qualities than the likes of China or Germany.
However, CAP alone receives $25 million per annum, so in just two years it is in receipt of far more money than all of the “Islamophobic” groups it collectively names and condemns have made in a decade. As a 501 (3)(c) organization, CAP’s existence seems to be entirely connected to attempting to swing elections in the Democrat Party’s favor, which would appear to be a contravention of IRS guidelines.
The “originality” of claiming there is lucrative money to be made from confronting Islamism is already a stale cliché.
Being a lifelong critic of Islam, red flags popped up in my head at his purported cozy relationship with Islam and prompted me to look very closely at the governor’s record on this particular issue and at this specific time….Unless someone can come up with solid evidence to the contrary, I feel relieved that Governor Perry is not an Islamophile, he is not even an Islamic apologist, and he can be entrusted with the responsibility of guarding our nation’s priceless heritage of liberty against the assaults of Islamic fascism.
Liberal elites like Keller are haunted by the specter of right-wing theocracy. When they see Christian conservatives on the campaign trail, they envision inquisitions and witch hunts and the suppression of liberty. They dread the prospect of a president respecting any "authority higher than the Constitution," and regard ardent religious faith as the equivalent of belief in space aliens.
“We can be saved only by fighting,” Hitler told leaders of the armed forces in February of 1933. Normal rules of diplomacy saw as their ultimate aim the avoidance of conflict and the settlement of international disputes by negotiation. Hitler did not play by these rules, though he repeatedly tried to publicly reassure people that he intended to do so. It took other European statesmen a very long time to realize this. Their misjudgments form the heart of this important book.
…The best chance of success was now, before Germany’s enemies were fully prepared. And so began the greatest war in history, a war that was to last until 1945, a war in which more than 50 million people would lose their lives, a war that would end in the destruction of Germany and the collapse of the European overseas empires…
In the latest upset, four federal agencies known as the Interagency Working Group (IWG) have delivered a plan to drastically censor food advertisers with products deemed to be “too high” in sodium, sugar, or fat that cater to any viewing audience between the ages of two and 11….It’s not just Twinkies and cookies that will be affected, either. Anything deemed to have a little too much sodium or fat will be tested under the new rules, including foods whose very production requires a high sodium content (like pickles) and those that are naturally high fat (like peanuts). As Katz wrote, “Nutritional staples such as Cheerios, peanut butter, and yogurt are verboten under the proposed standards, which effectively constitute a government-regulated grocery list.”
Unions Try To Dis-invent Success for Poor Minority Students:
Only 11% of likely voters think government should invent income for the poor
President Obama doubles-down on inventing prosperity through Big Government-Big Business collusion
What have we learned about inventing prosperity in 2066 years?
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) “The budget must be balanced, the Treasury must be refilled, public debt must be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom must be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands must be curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” – Cicero, 55 B.C.
While Bastiat agrees that repairing broken windows is a good thing, encouraging the glazier's trade and income, he argues that it is quite different from the idea that breaking windows is a good thing, in that it would cause money to circulate and encourage industry in general. Why? Because a shopkeeper who spends money to fix broken windows cannot spend or invest that money on new ventures.
Obama Not Ready For Prime time : "Obama looks small. It was a juvenile move for a President to make and it shows he has a poor understanding of how to use the power of the presidency." + TV Speech by a Zombie:
In the last 2 1/2 years, we’ve had over 200 presidential talks about jobs, and now there’s going to be yet another one. It’s not just an ordinary one, but another giant showpiece, a speech to a joint session of Congress, and coincidentally at the same time as a previously scheduled GOP presidential debate. Congress is probably going to be told, as it has been over the last 2 1/2 years, that failure to enact this, that, or the other thing is irresponsible and inexcusable. But according to reports, there’s nothing new in the speech, certainly nothing that could be effective. Moreover, this latest rehash of same-old, same-old comes from a guy with support from Independents in the 30′s and whom over one in four Democrats want replaced as the top of the 2012 ticket. Even with the media carrying this guy’s water, we can’t see how this is anything other than a formula for electoral catastrophe. If you disagree, educate us please.
This “In” button will be distributed to all those who view his speech:
Zombie capitalism: No, You Can't Invest Like Warren Buffett: His Bank of America deal is a bargain no ordinary investor could get.
Zombie Terrorism: Abdul Hakiim converted to Islam, wore long robes, dreamed of paradise; He was arrested in July for trying to enter Britain with bomb-making guides and al-Qaida propaganda. "But his motivations remain a mystery"
Zombie Riot at amusement park over 'no hijab' rule
Zombie Love: The Rashid Khalidi whose tape with Barack Obama the Los Angeles Times refuses to release, has this to say about fellow zombie Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. going on a trip to Israel.
So, the vice president goes to China—and if that sounds like the beginning of a bad comedy routine, it’s because our current vice president has made it one. The man is a walking pratfall, a clown of the tongue-tied, stumbling kind, and only the media’s determined effort to shield the Obama administration from laughter has kept Joe Biden’s miscues, misunderstandings, and mispronouncements from becoming our long-running national joke.
[In] the state of Texas, we’ve created an economy here that leads the nation in job creation…What’s dumb is to oversee an economy that has lost that many millions of jobs, to put unemployment numbers over his four years will stay probably at 9 percent, to downgrade the credit of this good country, to put fiscal policies in place that were a disaster in the ‘30s and try them again in the 2000s – that’s what I consider to be the definition of dumb.
Among the people we tend to dine with, nobody ever orders a dessert. 
We don't post much about interior decorating here, but we do post about things we learn about.
Academia seems torn between utter decadence and Spanish Inquisition-like puritanism. Peter Wood discusses 
Ray Dalio, the quiet, reclusive, distinctly unflashy, and jazz- and opera-loving founder of 
Those folks who want to exterminate my pale, mottled, and unwholesome skin tone need to learn more about us, and try to understand us better. Empathy, understanding, all that good stuff. Here's a start: 
