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.
"We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name - liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names - liberty and tyranny."
"What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?"
"When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic]."
"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: 'And this, too, shall pass away.' How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!"
"In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just - a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless."
"Property is the fruit of labor...property is desirable...is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built."
It's been quite a while since we reminded our readers that they can read Samuel Pepys' Diary online. Here's Feb 4, 1664:
Lay long in bed discoursing with my wife about her mayds, which by Jane’s going away in discontent and against my opinion do make some trouble between my wife and me. But these are but foolish troubles and so not to be set to heart, yet it do disturb me mightily these things. To my office, and there all the morning. At noon being invited, I to the Sun behind the ‘Change, to dinner to my Lord Belasses, where a great deal of discourse with him, and some good, among others at table he told us a very handsome passage of the King’s sending him his message about holding out the town of Newarke, of which he was then governor for the King. This message he sent in a sluggbullet, being writ in cypher, and wrapped up in lead and swallowed. So the messenger come to my Lord and told him he had a message from the King, but it was yet in his belly; so they did give him some physique, and out it come. This was a month before the King’s flying to the Scotts; and therein he told him that at such a day, being the 3d or 6th of May, he should hear of his being come to the Scotts, being assured by the King of France that in coming to them he should be used with all the liberty, honour, and safety, that could be desired. And at the just day he did come to the Scotts. He told us another odd passage: how the King having newly put out Prince Rupert of his generallshipp, upon some miscarriage at Bristoll, and Sir Richard Willis1 of his governorship of Newarke, at the entreaty of the gentry of the County, and put in my Lord Bellasses, the great officers of the King’s army mutinyed, and come in that manner with swords drawn, into the market-place of the towne where the King was; which the King hearing, says, “I must to horse.” And there himself personally, when every body expected they should have been opposed, the King come, and cried to the head of the mutineers, which was Prince Rupert, “Nephew, I command you to be gone.” So the Prince, in all his fury and discontent, withdrew, and his company scattered, which they say was the greatest piece of mutiny in the world. Thence after dinner home to my office, and in the evening was sent to by Jane that I would give her her wages. So I sent for my wife to my office, and told her that rather than be talked on I would give her all her wages for this Quarter coming on, though two months is behind, which vexed my wife, and we begun to be angry, but I took myself up and sent her away, but was cruelly vexed in my mind that all my trouble in this world almost should arise from my disorders in my family and the indiscretion of a wife that brings me nothing almost (besides a comely person) but only trouble and discontent. She gone I late at my business, and then home to supper and to bed.
Southeast Georgia, 1940s. For those who wouldn't know, them is mules, not hosses. The horse whip makes it obvious.
Believe it or not, your Editor has driven mules, but does not intend to do so in the future. A whip, or a 2X4 between the ears, is required or they will not listen. One must get a mule's attention.
If you disassembled the current slate of candidates from both parties into their component parts, then stitched together the best bits from each of them, (good luck looking for the good bits) you might be able to make a zombie Franklin Pierce out of the mess. Maybe. After you re-animate the dodgy potlach politician you've assembled, it could wear any one of their empty suits. Not one of them is qualified to go out and get Eisenhower a pack of smokes. America has always produced great men (and women) like Ike.
A reader sent this 1954 personal letter from Dwight Eisenhower to a relative, in which he discusses governance and the Supreme Court. It is a pleasure to read, and it gave me a better sense of who he was. A sample:
Now it is true that I believe this country is following a dangerous trend when it permits too great a degree of centralization of governmental functions. I oppose this--in some instances the fight is a rather desperate one. But to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything--even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution.
In Ike, an abundance of common sense and practicality became uncommon sense. Read entire letter.
Image: "I Like Ike" was the slogan of 1952's Draft Eisenhower movement. The Left always viewed Ike as stupid. Some things never change.
OK, I will grant you that Frank Loesser caused 9/11. But did the demonic imperialist Loesser also cause the Moslem hate and murderousness in Bali, Thailand, Burma, Turkey, England, India, Pakistan, and Africa? "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is a great song, but who knew that it was that well-known in places like Bali?
To play it safe, let's just go ahead and ban that terrible tune which has understandably caused the world so much misery, hate, and bloodshed.
But first, before the EU and the UN ban it, one more time with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan with the insensitive Moslem-offending song that began it all:
A friend of Maggie's took this shot at the WTC site yesterday:
People my age think that the 30s and 40s happened in black and white. Insty found this wonderful slide show of color photos of the US in the 30s and 40s. The photo below is Houston.
When Roger writes, it's a safe bet that he is writing what we would write, had we the time, brains, and talent. A quote from Hillary and Hayek, Redux:
As Hayek observed, the socialist, the sentimentalist, cannot understand why, if people have been able to “generate some system of rules coordinating their efforts,” they cannot also consciously “design an even better and more gratifying system.” Central to Hayek’s teaching is the unyielding fact that human ingenuity is limited, that the elasticity of freedom requires the agency of forces beyond our supervision, that, finally, the ambitions of socialism are an expression of rationalistic hubris. A spontaneous order generated by market forces may be as beneficial to humanity as you like; it may have greatly extended life and produced wealth so staggering that, only a few generations ago, it was unimaginable. Still, it is not perfect. The poor are still with us. Not every social problem has been solved. In the end, though, the really galling thing about the spontaneous order that free markets produce is not its imperfection but its spontaneity: the fact that it is a creation not our own. It transcends the conscious direction of human will and is therefore an affront to human pride.
The urgency with which Hayek condemns socialism is a function of the importance of the stakes involved. As he puts it in his last book The Fatal Conceit, the “dispute between the market order and socialism is no less than a matter of survival” because “to follow socialist morality would destroy much of present humankind and impoverish much of the rest.” We get a foretaste of what Hayek means whenever the forces of socialism triumph. There follows, as the night the day, an increase in poverty and a diminution of individual freedom.
We posted this link yesterday from American Thinker: Alinsky's tactics: Hillary and Obama. A quote:
Obama's four-year stint as a political organizer and agitator in Chicago's South Side neighborhoods gave him a hands-on education in Alinsky revolutionary tactics, which he seems adept at using now. His problem, however, may be that he is in direct competition for the ultimate power prize, the Presidency, against another Alinskyite, Hillary Clinton, who studied Alinksy and his rule book and turned down an offer to work for him.
Here's a summary of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Simon at Classical Values considers The Democrats' Gramscian Problem. Divide and conquer to create the brotherhood of man, without use of arms. Alinksy was indeed a Gramscian Marxist, in my view, although he is often labelled otherwise. We did an introduction to Gramsci here. ("The long march through the culture.")
Simon links to a piece at Armed and Dangerous about ideological warfare and the Gramscian damage to America. He lists the most important Stalinist propaganda memes:
There is no truth, only competing agendas.
All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.
He observes that these notions would have been considered insane just a generation ago, and comments:
The first step to recovery is understanding the problem. Knowing that suicidalist memes were launched at us as war weapons by the espionage apparatus of the most evil despotism in human history is in itself liberating. Liberating, too, it is to realize that the Noam Chomskys and Michael Moores and Robert Fisks of the world (and their thousands of lesser imitators in faculty lounges everywhere) are not brave transgressive forward-thinkers but pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant.
Jackie Robinson was VP of the Chock Full o' Nuts coffee company, whose chain of luncheonettes in NYC were as well-known from the 20s through the 60s as MacDonalds is today. Note the prices. And note the piece of Scotch tape holding up the Dodger's banner - for those few who might not recognize the great man.
I have always gotten a kick out of this portrait of the ineffectual and depressive Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf ll (1552-1612) as Vertumnus - Roman God of the Seasons, by Milan-born Guiseppe Arcimboldo.
Did agriculture make a mess of the world? From Hunter-gatherers: Noble or Savage? in The Economist. It begins:
Human beings have spent most of their time on the planet as hunter-gatherers. From at least 85,000 years ago to the birth of agriculture around 73,000 years later, they combined hunted meat with gathered veg. Some people, such as those on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Sea, still do. The Sentinelese are the only hunter-gatherers who still resist contact with the outside world. Fine-looking specimens—strong, slim, fit, black and stark naked except for a small plant-fibre belt round the waist—they are the very model of the noble savage. Genetics suggests that indigenous Andaman islanders have been isolated since the very first expansion out of Africa more than 60,000 years ago.
About 12,000 years ago people embarked on an experiment called agriculture and some say that they, and their planet, have never recovered. Farming brought a population explosion, protein and vitamin deficiency, new diseases and deforestation. Human height actually shrank by nearly six inches after the first adoption of crops in the Near East. So was agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”, as Jared Diamond, evolutionary biologist and professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, once called it?
We re-link Andrew Bacevitch's Wilson Quarterly essay from 2005. A quote:
"American foreign policy was never the same after King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia met with President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 and pledged a steady oil supply in return for US protection."
Read the whole fascinating story of American involvement in the Middle East. It's all about geopolitics, and it is deadly serious.
Here's the once-secret story of the CIA and Brit-led coup against Premier Mossadeq. It is not a pretty story, and the Shah had little recommend him other than his affection for the West.
The Report to London is particularly discouraging. Churchill did not have his act together. We see, today, the unintended consequences of that clever scheme. To be fair to all, though, the retrospective view is always smarter.
Two of the most important events in American history involved George Washington at Christmastime. The first, of course, was the crossing of the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton which took place on Dec 26, 1776. That victory proved to an uneasy Continental Congress that Americans could stand up to European troops (in this case, Hessians).
The Journals of the late Arthur Schlesinger have received a good deal of attention, but most of it has concerned Schlesinger’s writing style, personality, or the broad topic of keeping and publishing diaries. The strangely neglected question of Schlesinger’s politics is finally addressed by the New Yorker’s George Packer, writing as one liberal assessing another. “In [Schlesinger’s] long record of speeches, conferences, lunches at the Century, and dinners at Mortimer’s,” observes Packer, “there’s an unmistakable sense that liberal politics belonged to a small group of the rich and famous who all knew one another and knew what was best for the rest of the country, while knowing less and less about the rest of the country. . . . It’s possible, even if you agree with almost every position Schlesinger held, to find the smugness and complacency not just annoying but fatal. His crowd made liberalism a fat target for the New Right; Reagan and his heirs seized the language and claims of populism from liberals who believed that they had had permanent possession [of it] ever since Roosevelt.”
In 1973 an Italian submarine named Enrique Tazzoli was sold for a paltry $100,000 as scrap metal. The submarine, given to the Italian Navy in 1953 was actually an incredible veteran of World War II service with a heritage that never should have passed so unnoticed into the graveyards of the metal recyclers.
The U.S.S. Barb was a pioneer, paving the way for the first submarine launched missiles and flying a battle flag unlike that of any other ship. In addition to the Medal of Honor ribbon at the top of the flag identifying the heroism of its captain, Commander Eugene 'Lucky' Fluckey, the bottom border of the flag bore the image of a Japanese locomotive. The U.S.S. Barb was indeed, the submarine that 'SANK A TRAIN'.
July, 1945 (Guam) Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz looked across the desk at Admiral Lockwood as he finished the personal briefing on U.S. war ships in the vicinity of the northern coastal areas of Hokkaido, Japan. 'Well, Chester, there's only the Barb there, and probably no word until the patrol is finished. You remember Gene Fluckey?'
'Of course. I recommended him for the Medal of Honor,' Admiral Nimitz replied. 'You surely pulled him from command after he received it?'
July 18, 1945 (Patience Bay, Off the coast of Karafuto, Japan ) It was after 4 A.M. and Commander Fluckey rubbed his eyes as he peered over the map spread before him. It was the twelfth war patrol of the Barb, the fifth under Commander Fluckey. He should have turned command over to another skipper after four patrols, but had managed to strike a deal with Admiral Lockwood to make one more trip with the men he cared for like a father, should his fourth patrol be successful. Of course, no one suspected when he had struck that deal prior to his fourth and what should have been his final war patrol on the Barb, that Commander Fluckey's success would be so great he would be awarded the Medal of Honor.
Stone walls are "newer" in New England than the early enclosures, which were made of wood. Split logs, like ol' Abe used to make, but not post-and-rail. They were the criss-cross leany sort which rested the rails on tilted posts. And to keep animals out of the cottage garden, they used paling fences.
But in post-glacial New England, where the fields seem to grow stones over the winter, you had to put the loose rocks somewhere, so why not make a wall?
It is hard to walk through any woodland south of Maine without stumbling across an 18th century wall, and sometimes you find an old apple tree in the corner, or an old apple-tree trunk. No doubt planted by the farmer for home-made cider, which was the only kind of booze the average Yankee farmer could afford.
This hilly, rocky woodland, as can easily be seen by the size and species of the trees in the photo, was pasture until about 40-50 years ago: it is a young beech and oak woodland, typical of acidic lowlands in New England, and well-past the point at which it is appealing to grouse and woodcock. Good for the wild turkeys, though.
The booming deer population, alas, vacuum-cleans the undergrowth, making it inhospitable for lots of small critters and birds: either we eat those deer or we return wolves and mountain lions to New England. (I'd vote for all of the above.)
These woods are dotted with low-lying vernal - and autumnal - pools, which are excellent for the toads, tree frogs, salamanders, Box Turtles, etc. "Wetlands," as some term them. I call them swamps, and I love them: they are a cradle of life.
...people today are genetically more different from people living 5,000 years ago than those humans were different from the Neanderthals who vanished 30,000 years ago, according to anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin. (Reuters)
We were puzzled by the report about accelerating evolution in humans. Didn't seem to make sense because one would think that the power of selection would diminish as mankind controls and creates his own environment.
But it turns out that one of the authors of the suddenly-famous study is on our blogroll - paleo-anthropologist John Hawks. In a blog entry, Why Human Evolution Accelerated, he begins to explain the theory. It's all about population size. Simple math. A quote:
...the ecological changes documented in human history and the archaeological record create an exceptional situation. Humans faced new selective pressures during the last 40,000 years, related to disease, agricultural diets, sedentism, city life, greater lifespan, and many other ecological changes. This created a need for selection.
Larger population sizes allowed the rapid response to selection -- more new adaptive mutations. Together, the the two patterns of historical change have placed humans far from an equilibrium. In that case, we expect that the pace of genetic change due to positive selection should recently have been radically higher than at other times in human evolution.
(Lord’s day). Lay long in bed, and then up and to my office, there to dispatch a business in order to the getting something out of the Tangier business, wherein I have an opportunity to get myself paid upon the score of freight. I hope a good sum. At noon home to dinner, and then in the afternoon to church. So home, and by and by comes Mr. Hill and Andrews, and sung together long and with great content. Then to supper and broke up. Pretty discourse, very pleasant and ingenious, and so to my office a little, and then home (after prayers) to bed. This day I hear the Duke of Yorke is come to towne, though expected last night, as I observed, but by what hindrance stopped I can’t tell.
We follow Samuel Pepy's Diary regularly. It is delicious. He would have been a star blogger, like Tom Paine.
"We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name - liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names - liberty and tyranny." 
It's been quite a while since we reminded our readers that they can read 
A repost from May, 2005
We posted this link yesterday from American Thinker: Alinsky's tactics: 
Here's the 
...people today are genetically more different from people living 5,000 years ago than those humans were different from the Neanderthals who vanished 30,000 years ago, according to anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin. (Reuters)