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.
The Dems sure do have their number, don't they? Remember all of those Obama ads we thought we so vulgar, retarded, and full of lies? They worked on single women, and other people too. They knew who they were talking to. It should be remarkable that Romney did as well as he did.
It's easy to forget, living as many of us do among people who have an abiding interest in policy, economics, and politics, that most people have only a casual interest in these things except insofar as they might directly affect them or excite them with tingles.
Reagan had the knack of reaching the low- and high-information voter at the same time. He could deliver boob bait for the Bubbas and Bubbettes while offering an inspiring theory of freedom and free markets to the more sophisticated. Perhaps Obama does the same, with a theory of serfdom and government markets for the bubbettes, the poor-but-happy dependents, and urban metrosexuals. Serfdom is hip these days and dependency is cool. The New America.
This is h/t Black and Right. I think the fat gal just hopes she might need Planned Parenthood someday. Maybe if she gets him drunk enough on Tequila shots she can earn her free abortion.
"Politics is downstream of culture." That's what the man says, and it certainly seems true these days. It's what I have been thinking. Sales, marketing, and branding matter.
Optics, rhetoric and perception matter. Though the new Democratic Party’s economic policies are based on antiquated ideas of early 20th century progressivism and European welfare states, it, not the GOP, is perceived as party of forward looking ideas.
If Republicans have any hope of persuading independents, they’ll need charismatic people, people who look and sound like a modern America and not a boardroom of Brahmin, because real-world competency is no match for fresh packaging and a good slogan. Welcome to democracy.
The fact is that the same people who run around instructing Republicans that they need to appeal to Latinos, blacks and women are aghast when exactly that happens. Are liberals agonizing this week over the defeat of Florida's Congressman Allen West -- a black man -- by a whiter than vanilla liberal named Patrick Murphy? Are they made furious by the defeat of a conservative black woman named Mia Love by yet another liberal white boy in Utah? Hardly. They are doing somersaults. Are they celebrating the fact that a woman --Michele Bachmann -- will be returning to Congress after defeating yet another one of those damnable white men, Democrat Jim Graves? Are they signing up for Palin in 2016? Are you kidding? They are beyond teeth-gratingly depressed and angry at the mere existence of both Bachmann and Palin
In The New Yorker, a Boston physician studies The Cheesecake Factory in an effort to decide whether Big Medicine can be more efficient and effective than the usual: Big Med. It begins:
It was Saturday night, and I was at the local Cheesecake Factory with my two teen-age daughters and three of their friends. You may know the chain: a hundred and sixty restaurants with a catalogue-like menu that, when I did a count, listed three hundred and eight dinner items (including the forty-nine on the “Skinnylicious” menu), plus a hundred and twenty-four choices of beverage. It’s a linen-napkin-and-tablecloth sort of place, but with something for everyone. There’s wine and wasabi-crusted ahi tuna, but there’s also buffalo wings and Bud Light. The kids ordered mostly comfort food—pot stickers, mini crab cakes, teriyaki chicken, Hawaiian pizza, pasta carbonara. I got a beet salad with goat cheese, white-bean hummus and warm flatbread, and the miso salmon.
The place is huge, but it’s invariably packed, and you can see why...
I'm no fan of Big Med - I practice Cottage Med and I prefer to do it my own way. However, it's a fascinating article and actually makes me want to try a meal at The Cheesecake Factory too. I had thought of it as a kind of cheesy place, but I love wasabi-crusted tuna as long as it is just seared.
When American people can get beyond any infantile expectations of government, it can be wonderful to see what they will do for eachother. Believe it or not, when last night's snowstorm was predicted, the tiny number of inept and seemingly useless FEMA people fled the flooded boroughs of NYC in their SUVs. (See BAD SIGN: FEMA office on Staten Island closes 'due to weather')
I finally have my power back (no thanks to government but with thanks to private industry who had a big job to do) just in time for a cold Nor'easter with snow blowing in and, while deeply disappointed but not surprised about the national elections, I am finding them interesting to reflect upon.
A few things I have been thinking about are these:
- the MSM runs interference for Dems, with passion and without regard to their professional integrity. They have done so since Nixon. It's worth billions in campaign funds or, really, it's priceless. They still have vast reach and influence in the culture at large. Just ask Obama.
...there is the fact that relatively few Americans actually pay for the government they consume. To a greater extent than any other developed nation, we rely on upper-income people to finance our federal government. When that is combined with the fact that around 40% of our federal spending isn’t paid for at all–it is borrowed–it is small wonder that many self-interested voters are happy to vote themselves more government. Mitt Romney proclaimed that Barack Obama was the candidate of “free stuff,” and voters took him at his word.
- What's with Hispanics? Are they a solid voting bloc? Would Rubio have made a difference? Who knows. He was my choice.
- I give Mitt Romney a lot of credit for the nature of his campaign. A good man, not a rock star.
...when all was said and done, the lines of people who feed off the political machine were there, and the handlers of the machine cast their multiple votes and carried off their manifold frauds because their own private economy depended on it.
Every time people ask me why the left has such a grip on this country, my answer is because they worked for it. It's the answer that most people don't want to hear, but it's true. The left has been planning this for a while. They have been playing the long game, building the infrastructure and indoctrinating generations. And to beat them, we will have to do the same thing.
The right is 40 years behind the left and it remains a disorganized collection of potentials seeking a compass point.
The Times Of Israel just published a new piece from me: "Anti-Israel Circles Of Influence On Campus." The focus is on faculty. Students may suffer but they come and go. The professors stay on, to indoctrinate more students, many of whom will go on to leadership positions in the US or their countries of origin.
I use the example of one prominent US campus. Names are named. "There are many other professors at UCSD who could be highlighted. The ones chosen are to illustrate how the ripples of influence on attitudes toward Israel emanates from the core Israel haters to the euphemistic ones to the useful idiots, and thus on to gullible students and faculty." To quote myself, "What one sees is circles of influence, with the inner circle providing the splash and outer circles adding to the wave. It is that wave that creates a campus atmosphere which gives the impression that the entire campus is critical of Israel and that, it is charged, creates a hostile atmosphere for Jewish and pro-Israel students and faculty."
This is similar to what is occurring on many other US campuses. The leading figures at each interact with their like at other campuses and influence many others at other campuses. Exposure is an important remedy.
I'm sorry to let you all know Marianne suffered a pulmonary embolism on July 23, 2012 and died September 25, 2012. She would love it you raise a shot of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey in her honor tomorrow after Romney wins this election. Oh, how she wanted her vote to be counted in this election! She was my dear friend; I miss her so, as I know all of you who had the privilege of knowing her will miss her as well. I have been working to get her beloved husband Downs settled into an assisted living here in Houston. Please pass the word on to those who I don’t have email addresses on. She was a great lady.
S. Colette Chapman
A toast to our friend Marianne, regardless of election results.
It's been sort of amusing watching people from the right side of the blogosphere weigh in for over a year with political advice for Willard Romney. They'd take a flurry on the pizza guy. Look over there, they'd say! If only Romney was a fat, loudmouthed ex-congressman, smug for no reason, then he'd get somewhere. Yelling RON PAUL! would solve everything. Why doesn't he foam at the mouth like the porcine blowhard from New Jersey? Romney just smiled and kept going. Let's face it: Romney is the Amiable Terminator. He won't stop until he's shaken the hand of every Sarah Connor in the phonebook, and asked each in turn if she needs some canned food to tide her over until payday. Then he goes back to the phonebook and starts in on all the Sarah Connellys.
Romney is a rare thing in American public life. He is what he is. You can see how pleasant, but stiff, he is in that video. He cannot be what he is not, even while his position requires that he mix with people who are not like him. Some might call that good manners. People who have no manners don't recognize good manners in others. They call it standoffishness, or aloofness, or call you a robot for being polite. Many see decency as a kind of accusation. There's no other way to evaluate the Republican response to Romney. They don't know what to make of a decent, earnest person. They were hoping for devious so they could win. The other side does that constantly, why shouldn't we? Romney's not interested. He owes you nothing if he loses. You owe him a lot for him even taking up the cudgels on your behalf. He's successful and happy and politics is bucket of guts to step in for a person like him.
Blog writers are just blog commenters that go first, and they all know what Romney should be doing. They envision the perfect candidate -them. I might point out to these kings of that rock there to this clod of earth under their shoes, that Romney got himself elected Governor of Massachusetts. You're giving political advice to a Mormon Republican who figured out how to be elected governor of Massachusetts.
Romney's detractors on the left aren't worth talking about. Romney and his family could be defamed --and Lord, weren't they -- but there's close to nothing in his personal or public life that isn't above reproach. People are imperfect creatures of course, but every once in a great while you meet people who seem incapable of deliberate misbehavior. The human foibles we are all subject to can be teased into imprecations of malice, but any reasonable person can see there's no there, there in the Oakland of Romney's misdeeds. He's a nice person, a capable and commendable businessman, a competent and genial public administrator, he's married to a nice person, they raised a large crop of nice people together, and so forth.
I come not to praise Romney, nor to bury him in predictions and advice. I'd just like to express my thanks to him, here, where he surely will not see it, for allowing me, once in my life, to vote for an entirely decent, honorable, and capable person to be the chief magistrate of the United States. That has never happened to me before. To me, he cannot lose. America might. It won't be his fault.
It's just gravy that a vote for him is a vote against his opponent, who is, and always has been a malicious, callow, greedy, grasping, low-rent A-hole. I won't even mention it.
We lose our power fairly often in late fall and winter storms. Besides flashlights and candles, I have a good supply of oil lamps around the place. I don't have a generator, and don't plan on getting one like the yuppies do.
When we bought this house, we found a couple of old Victorian oil lamps in the attic, similar to this blue one. Perfect for a whorehouse, we feel. This site sells repro oil lamps.
My favorites are a few 50 year-old Dietz wagon lanterns that I keep in the garage and down in the barn. They still make them, but in China now, and are distributed by Kirkman, which has tons of lamps and lanterns of all sorts.
When I was a kid in CT, we kept a spouted barrel of kerosene in the garage. It had many uses (including for burning the garbage in the garbage pit - think Hell - Gehenna).
- LBJ's federal flood insurance is a perfect example of unintended consequences. The perverse incentive was to encourage people to build on flood plains and coastal areas. Yes, flood insurance is subsidized by you.
- Said by Newt on the radio today: "Barack Obama is a show horse, not a work horse."
- Threw out everything in both fridges and freezers today. Bummer. However, I cooked the bacon hoping for the best, and made bacon and tomato sandwiches. Delicious. I even used the warm mayo from the fridge. And I am still fine.
- Pupette evacuated from NYC decided that living in the cold and dark was getting old, so finagled a trip to San Francisco.
- None of the computer systems I have had access to can do what my own can. Quite annoying to be off all the grids.
- Received this email today from our occasional contributor Bulldog in New Jersey. It begins here, more below the fold with some of my comments:
I'm sure my problems are minor compared to the Doc's Big C - or even compared to the hundreds of thousands who have lost loved ones, friends, homes, etc. It's clear this storm has been devastating. And I agree with my governor that this is not a political situation - however, the night before the storm I did see Obama functionaries commenting on Romney's stance regarding FEMA, so as far as I'm concerned, he drew first blood in the politicization of the storm.
I won't go too political. No need to, and it's not worth it. Christie's stance so far has been correct, at least pre-storm, though post-storm I think he's gotten a bit soft.
But I'm at a disadvantage. I have no power or heat. I haven't had much in the way of news for 4 days, at least not more than I can get on an iPhone. I have been out of work for a week, and may miss more. Since I just took a new position (hence my lack of posting lately), missing work is a bit of a problem. But the company is good about my situation.
The founder and Chairman of GoDaddy.com pledges $1-million to match your donations to the Semper Fi Fund, which aids wounded warriors. He is a proud former Marine Lance Corporal who takes the opportunity of celebrating our 237th Anniversary on November 10th and Veterans Day on November 11th to go beyond us Marines' usual pride in leading on land, sea and air to salute members of all our armed forces. They have all proved themselves worthy as proud warriors over the past decade, and the wounded need your support to rejoin and enrich us civilians with their unmatchable spirit and values.
They gave a lot. You can, at least, give a little. Thanks.
Gee whiz, it's getting breezy and blustery in Yankeeland today. Expecting to lose power to our servers any minute. If I lived near the shore, I'd throw out an anchor. But on to more interesting topics than the weather -
My pic in an oil shop in Spello, last summer. They have little paper cups for tasting. People design their own blends:
My lad quipped yesterday, as I was dressing the salad I had brought for Dad's birthday, "America needs to free itself from dependence on imported olive oil."
I was using a super-special oil I had smuggled home from Umbria along some of my precious but tiny supply of 25 year-old Balsamic that friends gave us as a dinner gift.
- As with wine in the past, California olive oil is now competing with Europe's finest.
- The fresher it is, the tastier and more fragrant. We use a lot of it here.
- To really taste it, dip a piece of bread in it - or just sip it to taste it as housewives and chefs do in Italy in the oil shops.
- For salads and for dressing cooked vegetables (eg asparagus, spinach, cauliflower, carrots, raw tomatoes, etc, with or without garlic), use the best you can get. For cooking, I don't think it matters too much but gourmets would dispute that.
- Costco's house brand oil (Kirkland) is much better than any supermarket brand for an everyday oil. It comes from their Tuscan orchards. Naturally, Dean & DeLuca has good oils. Cold-pressed extra virgin.
- High-end Italian oils are often blends of olive varieties from neighboring orchards. Reminds me that I have a friend who owns an olive orchard in Greece on a hill overlooking the Aegean, and each year he ships home 100 small casks of his own orchard's first pressing to give friends as Christmas presents. Nice.
- Do not dress a salad until immediately before it is to be offered. Also, never serve a salad with a meal. Only before. There are many good reasons for that.
- Do you prefer red wine vinegar to Balsamic? The store stuff is terrible. Make your own. When you drink a bottle of decent red wine, leave an inch or two in the bottle if you have the moral fortitude to do so, stick the cork back on top lightly or leave it off, and put it in the pantry. In a couple of weeks, it's good wine vinegar. The better the vino, the better the flavor. It's possible to go overboard with this.
- As I posted a while ago, Balsamic Vinegar is not really vinegar. Here's my post on that topic.
Here's how we make and dress a simple Italian-style, home-style salad: Buttercrunch or Boston Lettuce, thinly sliced bell peppers - all 4 colors, red onion quartered then sliced thin, 1" tomato chunks. Then I drizzle a little balsamic over it - not too much - and toss gently. Then I drizzle the oil over it, season with salt and pepper, and toss gently again. Always the vinegar before the oil.
For fancy dinners, plain frizze or mache with balsamic and oil.
We recently posted a report of the closing of the last brownstone quarry in the US. Manhattan and Brooklyn have tons of old brownstone buildings, commonly entire blocks of them. Some people like the look and some do not, but it is not a very durable building stone.
I stumbled on this brownstone for sale on the Upper West Side (87th St, just off the Park). If I were a rich guy, I'd enjoy owning a place like this with the top floor used as living quarters for the help. Like most buildings from the era (1850-1910), each brownstone has a garden out back. Looks great from theoutside, but if you look at the video you'll hate what they did inside when converting it to apartments.
Tides are not all that easy to understand. For example, can you explain why there are no tides at the equator? It's complicated because the earth revolves and rotates, the moon revolves on an angle to the equator, and then there's the sun too. Lots of moving parts. Plus local factors.
My need to refresh my understanding arises because hurricane Sandy, who will likely be visiting the northeast somewhere between Chesapeake Bay and Boston at the end of this weekend, is coming during a full moon - the Hunter's Moon as the redskin Injuns termed it.
(The latest tracking guesses show it mostly missing New England and turning inland somewhere between Delmarva and Jersey. Meteorologists love this sort of unusual weather event. I heard one on the radio saying that he had always wondered why conditions were so rare for a storm to make a left turn due to a low cold front sucking in a storm. The Weather Nerd is following things, and posted this pic showing the Clash of Titans - the polar cold front and Sandy:)
Full Moons indicate that the moon and the sun are on the same side of the earth, illuminating the moon, and New Moons when they are pulling from opposite sides. Thus both of these phases exaggerate the tidal effect by combining lunar with solar gravity. They're called Spring Tides.
In Maggie's Farm's part of the world, high tide and low tide vary from 6-10' in each tide change, and increase around 20% during Spring Tides. Thus a storm surge during a Spring Tide is likely to cause more damage and flooding to structures (ie, structures which are built where they don't belong in the first place - on coastal beaches, waterfronts, flood plains, and on old marshes covered with a thin layer of fill back before the laws were changed).
Storm surges in New England, whether from Nor'easters or the occasional hurricane, can be 5-10 feet above high tide. A very large or slow-moving storm can effect more than one tide cycle.
Re storm prep, I fetched a fresh bottle of Dalwhinnie, some smokes, charcoal for cooking, good veggies to grill, and I topped off my gas can for the chain saw so I don't get trapped here by fallen trees and limbs. Firewood? Check. My ancient, second-hand diesel generator seems to be on the blink, but we can cope. Sometimes it will start if I kick it in the kidneys while pushing the button.
Meanwhile, I eagerly await the first lunatic to blame the storm on global warmingclimate change HotColdWetDry, as the Pirate terms it.
The pinup girl of Maggie's Farm, Marianne Matthews, who in so many ways epitomized our ideals, educated the uncouth, and lifted our spirits has died. I and you hadn't heard from her in a month or so. I just phoned the police in the city where she lived and they checked her house. She passed about a month ago. Her dear husband (87), who had been failing, is now in a nursing home. (If anyone is in the Houston area and is able to do a bit of traveling nearby, please email me via the Comments and I'll get back to you offline.)
Here's a photo she sent me in 2011, when Marianne was 82, with a, to use Marianne's description, "surrogate daughter." Marianne never had children of her own, unless you count the thousands and thousands who have known and loved her.
Marianne was a highly trained and accomplished musician, as well as a highly educated lady (Columbia). Several years ago she sent me photos of her first guitar that her father bought her as a child. Marianne also was a noted folksinger during the 1940s and 1950s. Several years ago a friend of hers rescued some tapes of her singing in the 1950s. I chose one cut, "The Last Rose Of Summer", and uploaded it and a photo of Marianne (when she was 44, taken in 1972) to Youtube. Here it is. With love to a very lovely lady. They don't make roses like that anymore. We are all saddened and diminished by her passing.
If you care to share your memories of Marianne, please Comment.
Here's the lyric to "The Last Rose Of Summer" and a bit about the poem.
'Tis the last rose of summer, Left blooming alone; All her lovely companions Are faded and gone; No flower of her kindred, No rosebud is nigh, To reflect back her blushes, Or give sigh for sigh.
I'll not leave thee, thou lone one! To pine on the stem; Since the lovely are sleeping, Go, sleep thou with them. Thus kindly I scatter, Thy leaves o'er the bed, Where thy mates of the garden Lie scentless and dead.
So soon may I follow, When friendships decay, And from Love's shining circle The gems drop away. When true hearts lie withered, And fond ones are flown, Oh! who would inhabit This bleak world alone?
The cumulative evidence is now evident to all with even bad eyesight that Benghazi is sad proof of what conservative critics have been saying for the past four years, that President Obama, his appointees and administration lack the dedication, insight and guts to defend the United States honorably or resolutely.
Democrats were known as the Party of national security weakness for a generation after their betrayal of South Vietnam and Jimmy Carter’s callowness in the face of the Iranian radicals. Aging memories, war tiredness, and big lies from the Obama administration managed to recover some national security credibility.
Now, it’ll take another generation for Democrats to, depending upon circumstances, recover some national security credibility. How focused and resolute Republicans behave will be important. Otherwise, abandon all hope for the US.
The latest revelation of betrayal of the men on the ground fighting desperately in Benghazi makes every veteran I know furious, makes every conservative voice howl in anger, but has yet to break the silence at Yahoo News, Washington Post, New York Times. They may be trying to run out the clock to November 6. That finger in the dike will not hold, possibly before November 6 and certainly after. The maggots in the chain of command in the White House, Pentagon, State Dept., and CIA responsible deserve to have their names engraved on a prominent monument to cowardice.
When you are fighting for this country, you run to the sound of the fire and the calls for help. If someone tries to tell you not to go, and you know people are dying, you go anyway. If you don't know all the facts on the ground, as Panetta claimed, you go anyway. You go because the rule has always been that when you are in trouble and call for help, help will get there as quickly and overwhelmingly as humanly possible. You go for them because you know they would come for you. If it ever becomes known that the cavalry will not be coming to your rescue, then you will tell them where to stick it when they ask you to put your butt on the line. When the day comes, and now it may have, when it is known that we are not willing to sacrifice more casualties in an effort, no matter how futile it may be, to respond to pleas for help from the men on the line, we will no longer have men willing to put themselves on that line. Fix it now, before those men, in whom so much confidence is placed, lose confidence in us.
...a growing body of research controlling for variables outside of aid supports the hypothesis that aid has an appreciable inflationary effect, though study results vary by type of aid and institution.
Like most individuals, institutions can always find new "needs" to spend money on. About three years ago, my alma mater announced a $600 million bequest. Two months later, their fund plea arrived in the mail, hoping I would increase my annual donation.
Did they lower tuition? No. For greedy government and greedy non-profits, it's never enough and never will be.
Humans aren't Bonobos, but in human connections there is always some sex in the air. The popularity of "friends with benefits" relationships among the youth, and now middle-aged singles - makes that clear. Lots of other things are in the air too, like competitiveness, childish emotional wishes, familial-type feelings, feelings of tribal affiliation. loneliness, delight or amusement in another's company, shared intellectual or recreational fun, exploitative aspirations, etc., etc.
My profound and earth-shaking point here is simply that human interactions and connections partake of all aspects of being ... human.
There's one thing I know for sure: Put a guy and a gal who are pals in a comfy place away from home, add alcohol, stir, and anything can happen. Alcohol numbs the prefrontal cortex.
Instead of seeing college as a private investment, we must consider it a public good. If we remember the generation that was educated after World War II, generous public support meant that they could afford -- economically -- to spend four years studying the subject that most interested or spoke to them, and then they took their education and did millions of things with it that helped us develop a richer society, not just in terms of wealth but in terms of knowledge, art, and citizenship. That generation could do so because they did not have to take on thousands of dollars in debt and to worry all the time about how to pay for it. They could do so because public support for their education -- meaning low tuition for students thanks to tax support for America’s colleges -- gave them the freedom -- the leisure -- to study.
While I am somewhat sympathetic to the feeling of the article, I also find it foolish in several ways.
First, it is not only the elites who have access to the liberal arts. With 70% of current job seekers holding higher ed degrees, that no longer applies.
Second, any public high school offers an abundant introduction to the liberal arts, enough to prepare anybody to pursue their intellectual interests for the rest of their lives.
Third, "leisure to study"? That's ridiculous. Full-time college offers leisure to drink, to attend football games, and to pursue the opposite sex. Best students I've known had no leisure.
Fourth, the idea of a "public good." Last I heard, that just means that somebody else ought to pay for it, preferably my neighbor via taxation. Why my neighbor should pay for my kid to "pursue at leisure the things that speak to him" is utterly beyond me.
I think it must have been painful for him to accept that many of the Liberal policies he had stood for during his career were plain destructive and exasperating to the ordinary citizen who just wanted to make an honest living.
Amtrak has around 20,000 employees with an average income of $90,000. I thought that the government takeover of passenger rail had been meant to be a temporary rescue measure, but I guess I was wrong.
Now I am not sure why passenger rail should be viewed any differently from the also-government-supported interstate highway system, or government-supported airports, but Clark Whelton claims Amtrak is a jobs program on wheels.
Where should one draw the line on taxpayer support of life amenities? I must confess that the high-speed Boston-Providence-NYC-Philly-Baltimore-DC Acela service is a very fine and heavily-used amenity for those in the Northeast corridor, as are the New York area commuter trains.
I received this email a few days ago:
We lose our power fairly often in late fall and winter storms. Besides flashlights and candles, I have a good supply of oil lamps around the place. I don't have a generator, and don't plan on getting one like the yuppies do.
My favorites are a few 50 year-old Dietz wagon lanterns that I keep in the garage and down in the barn. They still make them, but in China now, and are distributed by 
Tides are not all that easy to understand. For example, can you explain why there are no tides at the equator? It's complicated because the earth revolves and rotates, the moon revolves on an angle to the equator, and then there's the sun too. Lots of moving parts. Plus local factors.
George McGovern was hard not to like, but his politics were naive in the extreme. Late in life, he decided to go into business, and wrote about it: 