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January 31, 2007

Environmentalism = Imperialism + Elitism?

Hundreds of years after we have become rich and comfortable by removing our forests and exploiting our natural resources such as coal, oil, and gold we are now going to the poorest countries on the planet to prevent them from doing what we did and having what we have. We want them to stay as 'traditional peasants' forgetting all the while that the poor people desperately want progress and desperately want to enjoy the good, healthy and long life we in the west take for granted.

"Mine Your Own Business" will make a lot of comfortable western people very uncomfortable indeed. It will show them the consequences of their blind faith in our new religion-the religion of environmentalism.

Phelim McAleer
July 2006

"Mine Your Own Business," a film by Phelim McAleer

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January 29, 2007

Innocence is ever simple and credulous.

Innocence is ever simple and credulous. Conscious of no designs itself, it suspects none in others.

Excerpt from William Wirt's Defense of Harman Blennerhassett in the Burr Trial

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January 27, 2007

Best thing I read this week

That I have arrived at 70 without ever having golfed is one of the facts of my biography to date of which I am most proud.
. . .
I don't much mind being mildly out of it, just as I don't finally mind growing older. George Santayana, perhaps the most detached man the world has known outside of certain Trappist monasteries, claimed to prefer old age to all others. "I heartily agree that old age is, or may be as in my case, far happier than youth," he wrote to his contemporary William Lyon Phelps. "I was never more entertained or less troubled than I am now." Something to this, if one isn't filled with regret for the years that have gone before, and I am not, having had a very lucky run thus far in my life. At 70 it is natural to begin to view the world from the sidelines, a glass of wine in hand, watching younger people do the dances of ambition, competition, lust, and the rest of it.
. . .
If the game is to be decently played, at 70 one must harken back as little as possible to the (inevitably golden) days of one's youth, no matter how truly golden they may seem. The temptation to do so, and with some regularity, sets in sometime in one's 60s. As a first symptom, one discovers the word "nowadays" turning up in lots of one's sentences, always with the assumption that nowadays are vastly inferior to thenadays, when one was young and the world green and beautiful. Ah, thenadays--so close to "them were the days"--when there was no crime, divorce was unheard of, people knew how to spell, everyone had good handwriting, propriety and decorum ruled, and so on and on into the long boring night of nostalgia.

Start talking about thenadays and one soon finds one's intellectual motor has shifted into full crank, with everything about nowadays dreary, third-rate, and decline-and-fallish. A big mistake. The reason old people think that the world is going to hell, Santayana says, is they believe that, without them in it, which will soon enough be the case, how good really can it be?
. . .
I also grew up at a time when the goal was to be adult as soon as possible, while today--the late 1960s is the watershed moment here--the goal has become to stay as young as possible for as long as possible. The consequences of this for the culture are enormous. That people live longer only means that they feel they can remain kids longer: uncommitted to marriage, serious work, life itself. Adolescence has been stretched out, at least, into one's 30s, perhaps one's early 40s. At 70, I register with mild but genuine amazement that the movie director Christopher Guest's father played keyboard for the Righteous Brothers or that the essayist Adam Gopnik's parents, then graduate students, took him in their arms to the opening of the Guggenheim Museum. How can anyone possibly have parents playing keyboards or going to graduate school! Impossible!

"Kid Turns 70: And nobody cares," by Joseph Epstein, The Weekly Standard, January 29, 2007

Turning 70 reminds me of something Benjamin Franklin said (paraphrasing):

If you would not be forgotten when you are dead and rotten, write something worth the reading or live the life worth writing.

Although I don't fit either of those categories, I do like the fact that as an editor and publisher I get to help others "write something worth the reading."

Mr. Epstein says that

At 70 one encounters the standard physical diminutions. I am less than certain how old I actually look, but in a checkout line, I can now say to a young woman, "You have beautiful eyes," without her thinking I'm hitting on her.

One of the things I like about being in my mid-50s is that I can now call every female over the age of 21 "dear" as in "Thank you dear" and no one gets offended. (I've also noticed that my teenage daughter has started calling her friends "Hon" - it's very Baltimorian and it strikes me as a very friendly greeting.)

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January 25, 2007

Flowers for 16th

Happy Birthday!

Thanks to Aunt Sophia for the flowers.

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January 22, 2007

"Nostrils: Satan’s Whore-Portals!"

Of course, it’s not gay marriage that enflames the Islamists. Heterosexual marriage enflames them, if the wife gets to drive and leave the house without a black sack covering her naughty bits, like her shameful wrists or noses. (Nostrils: Satan’s Whore-Portals!) Take a look around, check the latest things to which the more aggravated folk object: dogs, because their saliva is Unclean; passengers in a cab who have a bottle of Shiraz, because alcohol is Forbidden, and now cigarettes. Dogs, liquor and smokes. I can see not trusting someone who doesn’t like one of those. All three? Deal’s off.

These are the acts of the extreme believers, not the majority, but in the end that’s irrelevant. The extremists are accommodated and the moderates undercut. It buys a day's peace, but it worsens everyone's tomorrows.
. . .
Anyway, it was the customer’s fault. The customer didn’t get the memo: assume devout Muslims will not sell cigarettes. But assume nothing else, I guess. Thus the virtues of tolerance and multiculturalism, intended to construct that gorgeous mosaic in which everyone holds hands and smiles at the common future, ends up codifying a tiered society that imposes the values of the least tolerant on the most. It seems as if the cultural commissars believe there is a magic point at which the culmulative amount of prostration, apologies and accomodations will satisfy the ranters, the plotters, the seethers, the madmen who live to hate and hate that we live. But the extremists won't be happy until the Queen wears a veil - and the next day they'll demand she give up the Corgis. Unclean.

"A good weekend," by James Lileks, The Bleat, January 22, 2007

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January 21, 2007

"Diet" books

Seth Roberts book, Shrangri-La Diet, is very popular. Now he recommends Spectrum Walnut Oil (keep it in the refrigerator). Use fructose, not sugar.

Seth's blog

Dr. Joel Fuhrman is an MD with a general practice but deals with many diabetics. His approach is very simple: eat lots of greens, fruit, and beans.

Be careful of foods with high glycemic load (this is different than glycemic index).

Revised International Table of Glycemic Index (GI) and Glycemic Load (GL) Values--2002, by David Mendosa

15 out of 16 published studies found that the consumption of low-glycemic index foods delayed the return of hunger, decreased subsequent food intake, and increased satiety (feeling full) when compared to high-glycemic index foods (14). The results of several small short-term trials (1-4 months) suggest that low-glycemic load diets result in significantly more weight or fat loss than high-glycemic load diets.

Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load, by Jane Higdon, Linus Pauling Institute, Oregon State University, December 19, 2005




. . .



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January 15, 2007

Franciscan University High School Youth Conferences

Franciscan University High School Youth Conferences

June 29 - July 1, 2007, Session 3, Steubenville, OH

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Casual sex is a con

I sacrificed what should have been the best years of my life for the black lie of free love. All the sex I ever had -- and I had more than my fair share -- far from bringing me the lasting relationship I sought, only made marriage a more distant prospect.

And I am not alone. Count me among the dissatisfied daughters of the sexual revolution, a new counterculture of women who are realising that casual sex is a con and are choosing to remain chaste instead.

"Casual sex is a con: women just aren't like men," by Dawn Eden, The Times Online, January 14, 2007

Dawn's blog, The Dawn Patrol.

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January 14, 2007

Name Embossers

January 14, 2006

Name Embossers

Foil Seals

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January 09, 2007

"Muslim Taxi Showdown In Twin Cities"

Why have we heard so few complaints about this attempt to impose Islam on cab customers? Because of oversensitivity to multicultural issues. The MSA and its apologists want us to consider the religious and cultural sensitivities of the cabdrivers, but again, no one forced them to take jobs where they could come in contact with people who have service dogs or bottles of wine. Should a restaurant end its alcohol sales if it hires a Muslim waiter? Should supermarkets ban service dogs if it hires a Muslim cashier? No. It is the responsibility of the immigrant to assimilate into our culture and to obey our laws, not the other way around.

Most immigrants already know this. Most Muslim immigrants, I'd wager, believe it. It's organizations like the Muslim Society of America that insists on silly edicts and their weak-minded followers that cause all of the problem, and it's the failure of Americans to insist on assimilation that perpetuates it.

"Muslim Taxi Showdown In Twin Cities," Captain's Quarters, January 8, 2006

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January 01, 2007

Vacation home rentals - HomeAway

HomeAway is a web site that lists vacation home rentals in the US.

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