August 04, 2008
"The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations"
The Financial Times has an interview with Gloria Steinem, a former Playboy bunny and founder of Ms. magazine who was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Steinem, who now backs Barack Obama, commits an amazing blunder:She believes women will vote for Obama even if Clinton doesn't get the much-mooted consolation prize of the vice-president's spot on the Democratic ticket--a job Steinem doesn't think is good enough for her anyway. Why? "It's not an independent position, to put it mildly. I would rather see her as the president of the Senate."Steinem apparently is ignorant of Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution, which stipulates: "The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate." Hard to believe both Playboy and Ms. had such low standards.
"The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations," by James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, August 4, 2008
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July 26, 2008
"Society is the same in all large places."
"Society is the same in all large places. I divide it thus:
1. People of cultivation, who live in large houses.
2. People of cultivation, who live in small houses.
3. People without cultivation, who live in large houses.
4. People without cultivation, who live in small houses.
5. Scrubs."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.) (writing while a medical student at Harvard)
More
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. - from Wikipedia
- Works by Oliver Wendell Holmes at Project Gutenburg
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. - from Wikipedia
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July 23, 2008
Counsels of St. Francis de Sales
Live + Jesus!
"I found Him, whom my soul loves. I held him and would not let him go."
"Gaze on God simply and straightforwardly and let Him do as He pleases."
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July 18, 2008
Time for Some Campaignin'
Time for Some Campaignin' - from JibJab on YouTube
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July 16, 2008
Happy Yorkie and owner
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July 06, 2008
Globalization and Its Discontents
Red State Update: Budweiser Bought By Foreigners? - YouTube
"Country Boys Can Survive: The Boys of Red State Update have Risen from Murfreesboro Obscurity to National Fame," by Jim Ridley, The Nashville Scene, September 20, 2007
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July 04, 2008
"Bachelorhood And Its Discontents"
It wasn't just that the bachelor was untrustworthy, wrote [George] Ade, he was also a “draft dodger” and a “slacker,” one who had exchanged the traditional male role of provider for that of refusenik. Or, as another wag put it, “The bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman out of a divorce.” Until quite recently the office bachelor was seen as a serious liability, and earned considerably less than his married counterpart. Vance Packard, in his 1962 book The Pyramid Climbers, noted that, “In general the bachelor is viewed with circumspection, especially if he is not well known to the people appraising him…[However] the worst status of all is that of a bachelor beyond the age of 36. The investigators wonder why he isn’t married. Is it because he isn’t virile? Is he old-maidish? Can’t he get along with people?” By contrast, the married man was the steady one, the stable lot, not least because, in Tallyrand’s memorable phrase, "a married man with a family will do anything for money.”
"Bachelorhood And Its Discontents," by Christopher Orlet, New English Review, July 2008
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July 02, 2008
"Sources Warn Miley Cyrus Will Be Depleted by 2013"
The Onion: Sources Warn Miley Cyrus Will Be Depleted by 2013
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May 25, 2008
Bumper stickers: "both popular and ineffective"
It is a fact that white people will never turn down an opportunity to enlighten other people on the correct way to think. While this is very easy to do through email or face to face conversation, it is exceptionally difficult to do while driving a car. Fortunately for white people there is a solution that is both popular and ineffective: bumper stickers.
#100 Bumper Stickers, Stuff White People Like
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May 22, 2008
Redneck Update, er, Red State Update
A few videos from Red State Update....
Catching Up With Edwards, Biden, Huckabee:
Hillary Wins Kentucky, Obama Takes Oregon:
From Red State Update
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April 17, 2008
These Yorkies love riding on the Piaggio MP3
Useful Yorkie Stuff | Piaggio MP3
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February 29, 2008
Counsels of St. Francis de Sales
Live + Jesus!
"Contemplation takes a completely simple, unified view of the object it loves. It is a simple gaze."
"Do all by love and nothing by force; love obedience rather than fear disobedience."
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January 20, 2008
Dogblogging
Gratuitous Yorkie pics
Ollie
Baxter - embarrassed by a recent trim; it will grow back
Useful Yorkie stuff
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January 19, 2008
"Humanity, thou art sick"
"In my mother’s generation, shy people were seen as introverted and perhaps a bit awkward, but never mentally ill."
So writes the Chicago-based research professor, Christopher Lane, in his fascinating new book Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness. ‘Adults admired their bashfulness, associated it with bookishness, reserve, and a yen for solitude. But shyness isn’t just shyness any more. It is a disease. It has a variety of over-wrought names, including “social anxiety” and “avoidant personality disorder”, afflictions said to trouble millions’, Lane continues.
Lane has taken shyness as a test case to show how society is being overdiagnosed and overmedicated. He has charted - in intricate detail - the route by which the psychiatric profession came to give credence to the labelling of everyday emotions as ‘disorders’, a situation that has resulted in more and more people being deemed to be mentally ill.
"Humanity, thou art sick: Shyness is now ‘social phobia’, and dissent is ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’. How did everyday emotions come to be seen as illnesses?" a review by Helene Guldberg of "Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness," by Christopher Lane, in spiked, December 2007
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January 13, 2008
Yorkies
Two happy little campers...
Baxter, aka Mr. B
Ollie
Baxter and Ollie
Ollie and Baxter
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Looking "at economics from the standpoint of Christmas"
[I]f we can look at Christmas from the standpoint of economics, why not look at economics from the standpoint of Christmas?
. . .
To justify Christmas giving we need to look past the hasty confusion of the "consumer," so described by economics, to the soul of the giver and see how it is improved by the virtue of generosity. The benefit of giving is more to the giver than to the receiver--a paradox better known to common sense and the Bible than to economics. For having a generous soul saves one from living in the relentless anxiety of never knowing whether one has enough for oneself. Of course, to be generous one must calculate what one can afford, and one must observe the chosen recipient carefully to see, not merely what he wants, but what good thing he can be induced to enjoy. Thus economics has an honorable role in the service of generosity, a role more useful, hence more economical, than attacking generosity.
And let us not forget the advantage of generosity to liberty. The commonest form of slavery is slavery to money, and generosity is a kind of liberation as well as utility for yourself. A country gentleman generous with his rustic hospitality had a better inkling of that liberation than Adam Smith with all his studied devotion to natural liberty. With the aid of a little feudalism lingering in our democratic, materialist age you can have the two great goods economics wants you to have but does not know how to achieve on its own. You can then crown these goods by taking a reasonable measure of pride for having spent your money well. Instead of damning a commercial society for being materialistic, instead of despising Christmas giving for not being properly materialistic, you can do your part to soften our materialism and make it more intelligent.
"When the Giving Is Good: Saving Christmas from the economists," by Harvey Mansfield, The Weekly Standard, January 14, 2008
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January 05, 2008
Counsels of St. Francis de Sales
Live + Jesus!
"'Learn of me,' He said, 'that I am humble and gentle of heart.' That says it all; to have a heart gentle toward one's neighbor and humble toward God. At every moment give this heart, the very heart of your heart, to our Savior."
"The iris is said to draw its petals together at the sight of the sun. Similarly in recollection our powers and faculties assemble and gather together within us out of respect for God's presence."
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January 01, 2008
Ring bell for psychic?
Doesn't the "psychic" know you're there?
Unclear on the concept.....
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December 30, 2007
Christmas in NYC
Spent a lovely five days and nights in NYC at Christmas.Saw two fun shows - "Spamalot" and "Is He Dead?" - and the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall - all highly recommended.
Enjoyed several evenings wandering through the holiday shops and watching the ice skaters at Bryant Park. Although the ice rink at Rockefeller Center is the famous one, Bryant Park is beautiful and it is not crowded so you can watch from the rink wall, shouting out encouragement to the newbies of all ages. Great fun, and some of the skaters are excellent.
In front of the ice sculptures at Bryant Park
Took youngest child to see Santa at Macy's. Although the Macy windows were a disappointment (the Bergdorf Goodman and Lord & Taylor windows were much better), the Santa we visited at Macy's was the REAL SANTA! The beard, the voice, the laugh, the Santa outfit - SPECTACULAR! And despite having dealt with crowds for hours, ALL the elves were smiling and full of Christmas cheer.
Window at Lord & Taylor
The Macy's Santa Train Conductor
Macy's Santa Elf "Lightfoot"
SANTA!
The Christmas tree at the Met was, as always, beautiful and worth the trip.Had an outstanding meal in Chinatown at Sanur and good dim sum at The Chatham. Also had a very good lunch at Toasties and enjoyed the jazz brunch at Rare Bar & Grill in the Shelburne Hotel.
FDNY: "Chinatown Dragon Fighters"
The holiday train show at Grand Central is always fun.Midnight Mass at St. Malachy's on West 49th had good singing and music - good homily, too!
The 7-day unlimited ride Metro card for only $24 made it easy to go all over the city using the subway and buses. An amazing bargain.
Merry Christmas!
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The Best 19 Movies You Didn't See in 2007
From "The Best 19 Movies You Didn't See in 2007," by Alex Billington, FirstShowing.net, Dec. 24, 2007
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
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December 29, 2007
Ring bell for psychic?
Doesn't the "psychic" know you're there?
I'm unclear on the concept.....
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December 28, 2007
The "monkeyman realism of eco-Christians and New Atheists"
The reduction of man to an eco-janitor, a being who creates waste and thus must clear it up, is more than a cynical attempt by isolated Christian leaders to connect with the public. Yes, Williams, Owen, the Holy See and Co. no doubt hope and believe (mistakenly, I’m sure) that adopting trendy Greenspeak will entice people to return to the church. But the move from focusing on love for God and one’s neighbour to focusing on ‘respect for the planet’ represents more than a rebranding exercise: it signals a complete abandonment by the Christian churches of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. And in this sense, it is not only God that is being downgraded by the new nature-worshipping priests; so is humanity itself. And that’s enough to make even a committed atheist like me worry about the current direction of the Christian churches.
. . .
The cult of environmentalism embraced by the Christian churches does away with morality altogether. Some sceptics claim that environmentalism is a new form of moralistic hectoring; it is better to see it as amoralistic hectoring. In judging everything by how much CO2 or pollution it creates, environmentalism dispenses with questions of moral worth and judgement.
. . .
Many of the great atheists of old were concerned with making man the centre of his moral universe; with freeing him up to become the ‘superhuman’ that he aspired to be, but which he could only glimpse in an illusory God. Today, by contrast, both eco-Christians and New Atheists want to bring man and God crashing back down to Earth… so that we can set about cleaning it up like the good little earthly janitors we are. At a time of such low horizons, is it any wonder that some people still do cling on to God, and seek transcendence from mundane everyday life through a belief in divinity? There is more humanity in their ‘superhuman’ delusions than there is in the monkeyman realism of eco-Christians and New Atheists.
"Mankind is more than the janitor of planet Earth," by Brendan O’Neill, spiked, December 27, 2007 (footnote omitted)
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November 28, 2007
"Nothing in the modern world compares with North Korea"
Nothing in the modern world compares with North Korea, though it gives us some clue about how life must have been under the pharaohs, in Imperial Japan before Hiroshima, or in the obliterated years--conveniently erased from memory by blushing fellow travelers--when Josef Stalin was revered as a human god.
. . .
The main feeling the visitor has in Pyongyang is one of pity at the pathos of the place--its hopeless, helpless overestimate of its own power and importance, the deluded ignorance of millions of people carefully protected from any inrush of truth about themselves, their country, and their rulers. Every radio and TV set has been carefully neutered, its tuning dial soldered so that it can receive only the transmissions of the North Korean state. There is no access to the Internet except for a tiny, select few. Cell phones are confiscated from visitors upon arrival, though the very senior elite are believed to possess and use them. The newspapers are comically constipated accounts of speeches by the Dear Leader, long-ago angling contests, and uninteresting visits by junior dignitaries from countries ruled by dubious governments, which you would struggle to find on a map.
It may well be even worse than it looks. Pyongyang is a show city, inhabited by a favored layer of privileged and chosen people, who know that misbehavior of any kind could lead to exile to places we cannot even imagine. I have seen the miserable coal towns of China, which are open to visitors and have at least been touched by the prosperity flowing through the People’s Republic. They look like 19th-century pit villages in Britain. But even I cannot conceive of the dreariness and overpowering gloom of their North Korean equivalents, hidden away in the northern mountains, which no Westerner ever sees.
"Prisoners in Camp Kim: Strange, secretive, and desperately poor, North Korea tests the limits of social control." By Peter Hitchens, The American Conservative, November 19, 2007
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November 09, 2007
Counsels of St. Francis de Sales
Live + Jesus!
"Hold tightly to God in peace, trusting in His love for you. Never let go!"
"Trust in the Lord, lean on His providence, and fear nothing."
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November 08, 2007
"The Real GM Food Scandal"
GM foods are safe, healthy and essential if we ever want to achieve decent living standards for the world's growing population. Misplaced moralising about them in the west is costing millions of lives in poor countries.
. . .
Seldom has public perception been more out of line with the facts. The public in Britain and Europe seems unaware of the astonishing success of GM crops in the rest of the world. No new agricultural technology in recent times has spread faster and more widely. Only a decade after their commercial introduction, GM crops are now cultivated in 22 countries on over 100m hectares (an area more than four times the size of Britain) by over 10m farmers, of whom 9m are resource-poor farmers in developing countries, mainly India and China. Most of these small-scale farmers grow pest-resistant GM cotton. In India alone, production tripled last year to over 3.6m hectares. This cotton benefits farmers because it reduces the need for insecticides, thereby increasing their income and also improving their health. It is true that the promised development of staple GM food crops for the developing world has been delayed, but this is not because of technical flaws. It is principally because GM crops, unlike conventional crops, must overcome costly, time-consuming and unnecessary regulatory obstacles before they can be licensed.
"The Real GM Food Scandal," by Dick Taverne, Prospect, November 2007
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November 06, 2007
Rock and radicalism
Doggett argues that the fraught relationship between rock and radicalism is the story of utopianism betrayed by commerce.
"Talkin' bout a revolution," Telegraph.co.uk, October 27, 2007
It could also be argued that the relationship between rock and radicalism is the story of nihilism rescued by commerce....
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November 03, 2007
"From the H-Bomb to the Human Bomb"
When the naive, the falsely naive, and the downright evil blur categories in support of their ideological prejudices and christen the killer of innocents a “resistance fighter,” more lucid minds disclose a different landscape. Consider an editorial published in a Lebanese paper on August 20, 2003, the day after a bomb-laden cement truck destroyed the United Nations’ center of operations in Baghdad: “Yesterday’s operation against the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations exemplifies this mentality of destruction. Expel all mediators. Banish every international organization. Let things collapse. Let electricity and water be cut off, and the pumping of oil cease. Let theft prevail. Let universities and schools close. Let businesses fail. Let civic life cease. And at the end of the day the occupation will fail. ‘No!’ protests Joseph Samara, ‘at the end of the road, there will be a catastrophe for Iraq. . . . The attack against the United Nations’ headquarters in Baghdad belongs to another world: it is a form of nihilism, of absurdity, and of chaos hiding behind fallacious slogans, which proves the convergence among those responsible for this action, their intellectual limitation and their criminal behavior.’ ”
We have entered another world. The threat of a new Ground Zero, small or great, advances behind a mask. The human bomb claims the power to strike anywhere, by any means, at any time, spreading his nocturnal threat over the globe, invisible and thus unpredictable, clandestine and thus untraceable. The terrorist without borders makes us think about him always, everywhere. Without an accidental delay on the tracks--just a few minutes--the pulverization of two trains in Madrid, at the Atocha station, would have claimed 10,000 victims, three times more than in Manhattan. Then there was London. Whose turn is next? Each of us waits for the next explosion.
The business of terrorists, after all, is to terrorize--so said Lenin, an uncontested master in the field. The ultimate refinement lies in the inversion of responsibility. Operating instructions: I take hostages, I cut off their heads, I show them on video; those who beg for mercy must address themselves to their governments, who alone are to blame for my crimes: my hubris is their problem. The less the terrorist’s restraint, the more he causes fear and the sooner you will yield in tears, or so he believes.
Recall the cries of hostage Nick Berg, agonizing as his torturers persisted laboriously over his bent body. “You know, when we behead someone, we enjoy it,” one of them informs us. “We did not kidnap to frighten those we hold,” another corrects him, “but to put pressure on the countries that help or might help the Americans. . . . It is not a good thing to decapitate, but it is a method that works. In a fight, Americans tremble. . . . Besides, I tried to negotiate an exchange of prisoners for Nick Berg. It was the Americans who refused. They are the ones truly responsible for his death.” Terrorist hubris bases its arguments on uncontrollable drives: I can’t help myself--give up! A similar strategy shows up on playgrounds: Stop me or I’ll do something terrible! The terrorist refines this rationale; he draws out his pleasure, prolongs death, cuts the throat slowly, goes beyond physical torture.
"From the H-Bomb to the Human Bomb," by André Glucksmann, City Journal, Autumn 2007
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