Sun and sea

I wrote this in a post the other day:

Today I dreamed that I was in a seaside village not unlike the one that I grew up in. (In my childhood village, the sea was always present even if you were not at the beach. You constantly caught glimpses of it glinting through trees or between houses.) My dream was like that. The sky was vast and clear, the sea sparkled in the sunshine and kids played and ran and laughed on the beach.

I think that dream may have been triggered by a Google search that I did about a month ago. One of the houses in which my family lived in that village was at the top of a hill down which a road ran to the ocean. There were houses on each side of the road so you could only sea a small portion of the sea. First thing every morning, I would open the curtain on my bedroom window and look at the ocean. I could tell with one glimpse whether it was good for body-surfing or surf-fishing.

If it was bright and sunny and the wind was blowing in the right direction, it was good for surfing. If it was gray and overcast, it was good for fishing. Also local lore had it that it was not good to surf when it was overcast because that's when sharks attacked. Of course they seemed to attack at any time. There were two deaths and four mutilations by sharks before 1959 (that's when I left for boarding school at the age of 11) when shark nets were eventually put in place.

But I ramble. I had a paint-by-numbers picture of a view down a steep road to the ocean with a small sailing boat bobbing on the waves. I loved that painting. It was mostly bright primary colors: brilliant blue sky, blue ocean with white-horse on the waves which showed that it was windy and the boat's beautiful red and yellow sail was fully filled out. Last month I remembered that painting and wondered if I could find something similar on the Web. I found some that had similar views but the colors were dull and they did not make me smile the way that painting used to.

When I wrote that previous post, I also Googled to see if I could find a picture of kids playing on the beach and again I was disappointed. Nothing seemed luminous enough for me. I definitely associate childhood with lots of light. Not only do the eyes dim with time but so does the mind. As we leave childhood behind the mind becomes overcast with worries, desires, plans. The light is still there but its sometimes obscured by the clouds of too much thinking.

Nothing in nature is exactly like that light but the thing that comes closest to it for me is the sun sparkling on the sea. It was dull and overcast here today so I couldn't go down to the beach and take the sort of pictures that I wanted but I found some pictures on the Web that I liked. The first one is Robert Littleford's Sun, Sea and Sandcastles.

Memorial Day

665 Days in Iraq: One Soldier's Photos - A selection of photos from the 23,000+ images that one soldier took during his 665 days in Iraq, spanning 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008.

Bonobos: great ape hippies?

Vanessa Woods on her new book, Bonobo Handshake:

When I wake up this morning, someone might try to kill me. I live 10 minutes from a small town called Durham, NC, where according to the last statistics, 22 people were killed, 76 women were raped, and there were 682 cases of aggravated assault.

When a chimpanzee wakes up in the morning, they probably have the same thought. In fact, if you're a male chimpanzee, you're more likely to be killed by another chimpanzee than anything else. If you're a female chimpanzee, expect to be beaten by every adolescent male who is making his way up through the ranks.

People often ask me why humans are so intelligent, as in, what is it other apes lack that makes us so unique.

I'll tell you this: I would swap every gadget I own - my car, my laptop, the potential to fly to the moon - if I could wake up as a bonobo. No bonobo has ever been seen to kill another bonobo. There is very little violence towards females. The infants get an idyllic childhood where they do nothing but hang out with their moms and get anything they want. There is plenty of food. Lots of sex.

And yet, according to one of our studies, 75% of people have no idea what a bonobo is.

This isn't really our fault. It's been 13 years since Frans de Waal published Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape, and since then, there has not been one popular book published on bonobos until I wrote Bonobo Handshake which is out today.

Compare this to over 300 books published on polar bears, 240 books on chimpanzees, and 380 books on mosquitoes.

This is partly because bonobos are so rare. There are as few as 10,000 left in the wild. And they only live in one country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has suffered the bloodiest war since World War II.

But it's also because politicians, scientists, and the media have been trying very hard to pretend they don't exist. Why?

Woods concludes that it is because bonobos are embarrassingly over-sexed: "For bonobos, sex is a mechanism to reduce tension." Their "society" is dominated by matriarchs who regularly practice lesbianism. They're the hippies of the great ape world who prefer to make love not war.

Bonobos are the only non-human animal to have been observed engaging in all of the following sexual activities: face-to-face genital sex, tongue kissing, and oral sex.

Top chimp; bottom bonobo (which used to be known as the "pygmy chimp"):

The Web Rewires Brains

Nicholas Carr:

The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system. When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms a bottleneck in our brain. Whereas long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time. And that short-term storage is fragile: A break in our attention can sweep its contents from our mind.

Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in moving information from working memory into long-term memory. When we read a book, the information faucet provides a steady drip, which we can control by varying the pace of our reading. Through our single-minded concentration on the text, we can transfer much of the information, thimbleful by thimbleful, into long-term memory and forge the rich associations essential to the creation of knowledge and wisdom.

On the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from tap to tap. We transfer only a small jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream.

I try to limit the amount of time I spend reading on the Web but, sadly, I seem to have lost my taste for reading books. Reading on the Web versus reading books is bit like buying ready-cooked fast food instead of cooking a real meal slowly from scratch. And it's just as addictive as junk food. I've become a junk-info junkie.

Saturday dining rooms

Another perfect day in paradise # 2,374

"Seeing the world the way God sees it." That's the first thought that occurred to me when I woke from my afternoon nap today. These thoughts followed:

I don't have an image in my mind of what God looks like but, if I did have an image of God in human form, it would not be an old man with a long beard as Jehovah is often depicted. My God in human form would be a child playing with his creation the way a child makes sand castles on the beach; a golden child playing with golden sand in golden sunlight. But I don't have an anthropomorphic idea of God. That's just a poetical concept.

Matthew wrote that Jesus said: "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."

Dorothy Sayers (the British writer of the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels and a devout Christian) said that "Except ye become as little children ye cannot enter the kingdom of God" means that unless "you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five" you will not experience heaven. (She added: "One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.")

Luke wrote of Jesus' explanation of heaven: "And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you."

I may be mistaken but the way I understand Matthew and Luke (and Sayers) is that heaven is a state of mind. (Maybe "mind" is not the right word. Perhaps it's a state of soul or heart.) And that state of mind must be like a child's in order to experience heaven. And, to see the world like a child, one's mind must be as clear and empty as the sky with not a worry in the world.

I don't know if there is a heaven or a hell after death but I've experienced both right here in this world.

No human can completely capture either the beauty or the horror of this creation. I've tried painting, music and writing and have always had to give up and say: "I can't do it."

Some great artists have almost succeeded. There are paintings and music which come as close to "seeing the world the way God sees it" as humanly possible. I had to give up painting because the materials were too expensive for me when I was a kid. I gave up music when I moved to Britain and left my piano behind in South Africa. I tried to keep up writing (because a piece of paper and a pencil could be always kept handy) but, the more I read, the more I realized that it had all been said before and better than anything I could do. The Bible, the Baghavad Gita, Shakespeare and hundreds of other writers have said everything there is to be said about God and his creation so I eventually gave up trying to do "creative writing."

Today was the first time in weeks that I've had time to take a nap. I've noticed something about the dreams that I have during a nap. They are different from the dreams that I have at night. They are brighter, lighter and sunnier. My night dreams, no matter how comical or cheerful, seem deeper, darker and more serious when compared with my afternoon nap dreams.

Today I dreamed that I was in a seaside village not unlike the one that I grew up in. (In my childhood village, the sea was always present even if you were not at the beach. You constantly caught glimpses of it glinting through trees or between houses.) My dream was like that. The sky was vast and clear, the sea sparkled in the sunshine and kids played and ran and laughed on the beach.

I was not in the dream until the very end. It was more like watching a movie. There was a story unfolding - something about the mischievous local kids making fun of the tourists who poured into our village at every holiday - but the story was not that important. The atmosphere was. The kids were bubbling with bliss. (I think of champagne when you pop the cork.)

It was heaven on earth but the heavenly aspect was not the beauty of the kids, the earth, the sea or the sky. It was the feeling; what was in my heart as I watched. As I awoke from my nap, the dream ended with me lying in a deck-chair on the beach with the ocean stretching away to the horizon which seemed close enough to touch. My mind was as clear and empty as the sky. I reluctantly dragged myself away from such bliss and awoke.

Heaven to me is that emptiness and clarity of mind; not a worry in the world. There is no thought of the past or future, no time, only now; no clouds, only the clear light of reality which is infinite and eternal.

I took the dogs for a walk and of course the cat and the chickens all had to come for a walk too. I had to laugh out loud because I felt like a cartoon version of Saint Francis with the dogs romping around me in circles, the cat trying to trip me up by rubbing herself against my legs and the chickens clucking and flapping and running to catch flies or stopping to scratch in the soil.

Words are inadequate to describe my dream so I tried to find a picture which would capture it but none of the pictures grabbed me. (I wish I could photograph my dreams.) This painting by William Charles Perry was my favorite picture of kids at the beach but the colors are not bright enough; the sky is not blue enough or vast enough; the sea doesn't sparkle enough and the kids' little legs are not dancing with joy on the golden sand while the waves glint like diamonds in the sunshine.

So I looked at my childhood photos. Here are three pics from my childhood (two with my sister - if they had been in color perhaps they would have captured my dream.) I decided to add the last one (of an old bald me and my beloved sea) to bring me back down to earth.

And the music which suits all this best is Claude Debussy's "Sacred and Profane Dances" or Maurice Ravel's "Introduction and Allegro."

Jane Austen

Quite a few people have said to me, when I've confessed my love for Jane Austen, that her books are "romantic novels for women." Not really. Romantic novels for women usually start with descriptions of their heroines physical beauty not by telling you how clever and witty they are or how much money they are worth - as Austen usually does.

Austen's novels are satires (or "social studies") or simply straightforward comedies - a fact that is not often obvious because Austen had a very dry sense of humor. But that does not mean that Austen was cynical about true love. On the contrary: she valued true love so much that she made fun of "romance." Of course most movie versions of Austen's novels are romanticized sometimes to the point of schmaltz.

From the contemporary novelist Jay McInerney's essay "Beautiful Minds: Jane Austen's Heroines":

“Critics have remarked that there is no real delineation of true love in Jane Austen and that is true enough,” David Dachies claims in an influential and otherwise sensible essay entitled “Jane Austen, Karl Marx and the Aristocratic Dance”. “Austen knew only too well that in that kind of society genteel young ladies cannot afford true love. The only object must be marriage, and marriage with someone eligible. In Jane Austen, only the poor can afford passion.” It’s hard to believe a reader of sense could be so preposterously obtuse and misguided, although Charlotte Brontë made a similar argument a hundred years earlier (“The passions are perfectly unknown to her”). For all of their differences, a belief in true love, with passion as its signal component, is precisely what distinguishes Austen heroines from most of their contemporaries.

It's a delicious essay for Austen fans.

Obama is bored with ordinary crises

From Op-Toons Review:

Washington, D.C.—Saying the President finds gushing oil leaks and religiously-motivated terrorists "mind-numbingly dull," Obama's White House advisers are seeking out crises "with more intellectual depth" to capture the President's imagination.

"The President is so cerebral," said one official, "that what he really needs is, say, a super-villain like Brainiac to challenge him to a chess game for world peace. That would really get the President engaged. A guy trying to blow up a car stuffed with propane tanks in Times Square? Not so much."

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's the Magic Negro to the rescue!

Why bother with a six-pack when you've got a keg?

Chubby men as attractive as men with six-packs:

[T]he respondents in the University of Queensland study rated images of slender or slightly chubby masculinity at least as highly as those with well-defined six-packs, according to study leader, Phillippa Diedrichs.
...
Diedrichs showed mock-up advertisements for jeans, skin-care products and cologne - featuring muscular male models and men of more average dimensions - to more than 600 students in their late teens.

Neither sex responded more positively to the muscle-bound bodies.
...
The results echoed Diedrichs’s 2008 findings that so-called "plus-size" female models sell products as effectively as their emaciated catwalk colleagues, and “directly challenge industry concerns that average-size models do not appeal to consumers”.

I'm not surprised. The whole "fashion industry" from clothes to modelling is controlled by metrosexuals and gays and they seem to be the only ones who find muscled Adonises and skinny skanks attractive.

Weird and wonderful buildings

It's not just interiors like sitting rooms and dining rooms that interest me. I also enjoy whole buildings. Yep, when I was a teen, I wanted to be an architect but my dad got sick and we got poor and - well, my life took another direction.

I'm mostly interested in small buildings like houses. (I will start posting the house pics I've collected soon.) I've done many drawings in my life especially floor-plans and facades of my "perfect house." Big buildings are beyond my scope but I've collected pictures of all sorts of buildings for years - from the sublime to the ridiculous.

This is the Hindu temple, Akshardham Gandhinagar, in India. It is built in the traditional ancient Hindu style but was only completed in 1992. There are many wonderful temples and cathedrals but, no matter how beautiful, "houses of God" give me the creeps.















Everybody knows the Opera House in Sydney. It was way ahead of its time in the "weird and wonderful" category when it was designed by the Danish architect, Jørn Utzon, in 1957.















This is the new London City Hall. The actual city of London is only one square mile and much of it was destroyed by German bombing during WWll and very few old buildings survived. (Christopher Wren's 1697 St Paul's Cathedral was only damaged not levelled.)

















This is the City Hall in San Jose south of San Francisco.















The European Parliament building in Strasbourg, France.




















The Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh - which did not exist when I lived there 40 years ago. This building looks like a prison to me - maybe because the Scottish Parliament is controlled by Marxists.













The Central Library in Seattle.















The next two are more whimsical than weird and wonderful.

A hotel in Bratislava,Slovakia.

















A hotel in Elciego, Spain.














I did not always take detailed notes of pictures that I saved. All I know is that this building is in Yemen and may be the palace of some sheik.






















And from the sublimely beautiful to the ridiculously ugly: The Fortress Storage building in Boston, Massachusetts.

The history of religion

Here are a couple of maps from "How different religions have expanded during the last 5000 years".

I posted the first and last maps and three showing how Islam expanded - not by conversion but by war - in only 500 years. It's no wonder that Mahomedans are so arrogant - and angry. They can no longer wage serious jihad with impunity so they have to resort to terrorism.

Palin vs the hacker

How David Kernell hacked into Sarah Palin's email account:

The first piece of the puzzle – knowing which account belonged to Palin – was already in place.

The governor’s personal email address had become public knowledge following a controversy that revealed she had been sending messages about official Alaska state business using a private account (gov.palin@yahoo.com), not illegal but seriously frowned upon.

Rubico knew that the security procedures on Yahoo! email accounts were incredibly flimsy.

Once he knew Palin’s address, all he had to do was guess the answers to a handful of ‘secret’ security questions about her – all of which, if she had answered them truthfully, could be easily deduced.

So, he logged on, told Yahoo! that he had forgotten the password to Palin’s account and started trying to gain access. It could hardly have been easier.

The first security question – asking him to confirm Palin’s birthday – was answered in a matter of seconds, courtesy of a quick visit to Wikipedia.

Guessing her postcode took just a couple of attempts. The last question took longer to solve, since it asked where Palin met her husband, Todd.

After a few failed guesses, Rubico punched in the name of the school that they had attended: Wasilla High.

The system was fooled. Believing that he was the Republican candidate for vice president of the United States, it asked him to set a new password for the account. He chose ‘popcorn’.

The screen flickered. He was in.
...
[B]uoyed by his success at gaining access, Kernell had bragged about it on an online messageboard called 4Chan.

‘There was nothing there, nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped,’ he told them.

‘All I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was governor… and pictures of her family.’

Kernell posted some of the things he’d found as proof – photos, screen shots, the new password – before realising he could be in serious trouble.
...
Within hours, the news that Palin’s email had been breached was spreading.

The account was shut down, but not before notorious whistleblower website Wikileaks had taken copies of the documents, a move which meant that the rest of the web started picking up on the story.
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Palin’s family started receiving abusive emails and phone calls and the McCain campaign went into temporary panic mode.

Later, Palin described the moment she discovered what had happened while watching the news on television.

‘I thought: what kind of creep would break into a person’s files, steal them, read them, then give them to the press to broadcast… in order to influence a presidential campaign?

'And what kind of responsible press outfit would broadcast stolen private correspondence?’

Within hours of the incident, journalists and bloggers had already traced Rubico’s own email account and linked it back to its owner.
...
Kernell, meanwhile, faces up to 20 years in prison. Experts suggest that the sentence will be significantly lighter, but the decision (which is not expected for at least three months) ultimately lies at the mercy of the judge, Thomas Phillips.

The "Miracle at Dunkirk"

It's the 70 anniversary of the Battle of Dunkirk:

In the Battle of France, the British Army suffered its worst defeat ever. The French Government was in a state of near panic. In this darkest hour for Britain, on 10 May 1940, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

By 26 May, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and the French First Army were bottled up in a corridor to the sea, about 60 miles deep and 15–25 miles wide. Most of the British were still around Lille, over 40 miles from Dunkirk, and the French still further south. Two massive German armies flanked them: General Fedor von Bock's Army Group B was to the east, and General Gerd von Rundstedt's Army Group A to the west. (Both these officers were later promoted to Field Marshal). Von Rundstedt's panzers were within 10 miles of Dunkirk.

"Nothing but a miracle can save the BEF now," wrote General Brooke in his diary. And General Lord Gort told Anthony Eden, the British Secretary of State for War: "I must not conceal from you that a great part of the BEF and its equipment will inevitably be lost even in the best circumstances." On 23 May, he put the army on half-rations. In Britain, 26 May was designated a "Day of National Prayer" for the Army.
...
On 27 May, the British fought back to the Dunkirk perimeter line. The Le Paradis massacre took place that day, when SS Totenkopf machine-gunned 97 British prisoners near the La Bassée Canal. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe dropped bombs and leaflets on the Allied armies. The leaflets showed a map of the situation. They read, in English and French: "British soldiers! Look at the map: it gives your true situation! Your troops are entirely surrounded — stop fighting! Put down your arms!" The Allied soldiers mostly used these as toilet paper. To the land- and air-minded Nazis, the sea was an impassable barrier, so they really did think the Allies were surrounded; but the British saw the sea as a route to safety, and they were ultimately proved correct.
...
In the nine days from 27 May to 4 June 338,226 men escaped, including 139,997 French, Polish and Belgian troops, together with a small number of Dutch soldiers, aboard 861 vessels (of which 243 were sunk during the operation). Liddell Hart says British Fighter Command lost 106 aircraft dogfighting over Dunkirk, and the Luftwaffe lost about 135—some of which were shot down by the French Navy and the Royal Navy; but MacDonald says the British lost 177 aircraft and the Germans lost 240.

The docks at Dunkirk were too badly-damaged to be used, but the East and West Moles (sea walls protecting the harbour entrance) were intact. Captain William Tennant, in charge of the evacuation, decided to use the beaches and the East Mole to land the ships. This highly successful idea hugely increased the number of troops that could be embarked each day, and indeed at the rescue operation's peak, on 31 May, over 68,000 men were taken off.
...
Many of the "little ships" were private vessels such as fishing boats and pleasure cruisers, but commercial vessels such as ferries also contributed to the force, including a number from as far away as the Isle of Man and Glasgow. These smaller vessels, guided by naval craft across the Channel from the Thames Estuary and from Dover, assisted in the official evacuation. Being able to reach much closer in the beachfront shallows than larger craft, the "little ships" acted as shuttles to and from the larger craft, lifting troops who were queuing in the water, many waiting shoulder-deep in water for hours. For many decades after the war, the term "Dunkirk Spirit" stood for a popular belief in the solidarity of the British people in times of adversity.

Here is a photo essay of the battle.

Africa at night

I'm a tea party ten-percenter

From a letter to my local birdcage liner:

Take just a moment and total the amount of tax you paid this year, federal, state and local. For example a married couple filing jointly making between $16,700 and $67,900.

Federal 15 percent; FICA 6.2 percent; Medicare 1.45 percent; state 9 percent, for a total of 31.45 percent. Now add the 6.2 percent FICA (SS) that your employer pays (in other words that 6.2 percent is a wage you don't get) and your total is 37.85 percent. Add the employer's 1.45 percent Medicare portion and the total is 39.3 percent.

Now what taxes do you pay annually on gas? Each gallon of gas has a federal tax of 18.4 cents per gallon (higher for diesel), and Oregon adds another 43.4 cents per gallon (higher for diesel), which is almost 62 cents per gallon, or about 20 percent per gallon at $3.00 per gallon. Now add an annual estimate of all the other taxes and fees you pay each year, phone, cigarettes, alcohol (sin taxes), car tabs, the list could fill the rest of this page, and see what your total tax bill really is.

The point is that the average American is already taxed at close to 40 percent and our government is looking at cap and trade, taxing the Internet, and the real killer, the value added tax. Plus, at the end of this year federal tax cuts enacted earlier this decade expire, and those rates will automatically increase. The death tax gets reinstated at the end of this year also, at a rate of 55 percent. It is not hard to imagine that if all, or even some of those potential taxes are enacted, the average American could be looking at an effective tax burden of 50 percent.

Michael K. Murray
Coos Bay

If ten percent is good enough for God, it should be more than enough for Caesar.

If I were Obama I wouldn't point any fingers

His bro', Kwame Kilpatrick, could get 5 years in prison:

Kilpatrick's legacy as mayor has been riddled with corruption and scandals. His previous conviction landed him ten felony charges including obstruction of justice, perjury, and spending city finances illegally.

10 Things That Should Always Be in Your Car

It's important to follow the Boy Scouts' motto while on the road: Be prepared! That means putting together an emergency road kit and carrying it around with you.

Bush's new book

Bush talked about his book to a wind energy convention in downtown Dallas:

The 63-year-old riffed on retirement, joking that he was playing shuffleboard after the speech and that his domestic agenda now consists of taking out the trash and doing the dishes.
...
He also joked about the comedown of post-presidential life, saying he realized how different his life was when he was walking his dog Barney through his new neighborhood.

"There I was," Bush said. "Former president of the United States, with a plastic bag in my hand, picking up what I had been dodging for eight solid years."
...
He said his biggest regret was not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that he was misled by intelligence reports.

Bush said he failed at elevating political discourse and said politics are "rough and ugly."

He said he remains disappointed he could not pass meaningful reform on Social Security and immigration, and that it was a tactical error not to tackle immigration after he won re-election in 2004.

The first thing historians will ask is "When exactly did Bush know that he was misled by intelligence reports about WMDs in Iraq?" Did he know before he got on the "nation-building" kick? If so, historians will probably conclude that he was merely digging a hole deeper.

GOP to Obama: "take a valium and stop being thin-skinned"

President Obama traveled to Capitol Hill on Tuesday for a rare meeting with Senate Republicans:

"The more he talked, the more he got upset. He needs to take a Valium before he comes in and talks to Republicans and just calm down, and don’t take anything so seriously. If you disagree with someone, it doesn't mean you’re attacking their motives — and he takes it that way and tends then to lecture and then gets upset."" Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) told reporters. "He's pretty thin-skinned."
...
Brownback said Obama explained several times that he was "under pressure from his left" on major issues, including climate change. Obama asked Republicans to be willing to take some of the same criticism from their right flank in working toward bipartisan accords, other senators said.

The most contentious moment came during an exchange between Obama and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), his 2008 presidential rival, over immigration. "I said we needed to secure the border first," McCain recounted. But, according to several senators, Obama argued in favor of a comprehensive bill that also provided a pathway to citizenship for illegal residents, similar to the legislation that McCain backed in 2007.

McCain also challenged Obama on the new Arizona immigration law, which Obama has criticized as "misdirected" because critics say it will lead to legal residents facing intrusive police scrutiny.

"He said he still believed it was open to discrimination," McCain told reporters after the meeting. "I pointed out that members of his administration who have not read the law have mischaracterized the law."

I sometimes wonder, if McCain had talked like this before, would he have won in 2008. Perhaps he tried too hard to be all things to all men and ended up looking fake.

Twain's autobiography to be published

The great American writer left instructions not to publish his autobiography until 100 years after his death, which is now:

A section of the memoir will detail his little-known but scandalous relationship with Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, who became his secretary after the death of his wife Olivia in 1904. Twain was so close to Lyon that she once bought him an electric vibrating sex toy. But she was abruptly sacked in 1909, after the author claimed she had "hypnotised" him into giving her power of attorney over his estate.

Their ill-fated relationship will be recounted in full in a 400-page addendum, which Twain wrote during the last year of his life. It provides a remarkable account of how the dying novelist's final months were overshadowed by personal upheavals.

"Most people think Mark Twain was a sort of genteel Victorian. Well, in this document he calls her a slut and says she tried to seduce him. It's completely at odds with the impression most people have of him," says the historian Laura Trombley, who this year published a book about Lyon called Mark Twain's Other Woman.

"There is a perception that Twain spent his final years basking in the adoration of fans. The autobiography will perhaps show that it wasn't such a happy time. He spent six months of the last year of his life writing a manuscript full of vitriol, saying things that he'd never said about anyone in print before. It really is 400 pages of bile."
...
Another potential motivation for leaving the book to be posthumously published concerns Twain's legacy as a Great American. Michael Shelden, who this year published Man in White, an account of Twain's final years, says that some of his privately held views could have hurt his public image.

"He had doubts about God, and in the autobiography, he questions the imperial mission of the US in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. He's also critical of [Theodore] Roosevelt, and takes the view that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa. He said they had enough business to be getting on with at home: with lynching going on in the South, he thought they should try to convert the heathens down there."

In other sections of the autobiography, Twain makes cruel observations about his supposed friends, acquaintances and one of his landladies.
...
November's publication is authorised by his estate, which in the absence of surviving descendants (a daughter, Clara, died in 1962, and a granddaughter Nina committed suicide in 1966) funds museums and libraries that preserve his legacy.

Now you know what I want for Christmas.

Fake Hollywood locations

Flowing Data:

This map from Paramount Studios, produced in 1927, showed investors where movies could shoot, instead of going to the actual places. Does your movie take place in Venice, Italy? No problem, head down to southern California. How about the Mississippi River? Check out the Sacramento River.

The new culture war: free enterprise vs. government control

I was going to read this yesterday but our dinner guests arrived early so that they could take a look at all our new farm babies. Arthur C. Brooks:

This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country's future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise -- limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution. These visions are not reconcilable. We must choose.
...
I call this a culture war because free enterprise has been integral to American culture from the beginning, and it still lies at the core of our history and character. "A wise and frugal government," Thomas Jefferson declared in his first inaugural address in 1801, "which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." He later warned: "To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it." In other words, beware government's economic control, and woe betide the redistributors.
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In fact, no matter how the issue is posed, not more than 30 percent of Americans say they believe we would fare better without free markets at the core of our system. When it comes to support for free enterprise, we are essentially a 70-30 nation.

So here's a puzzle: If we love free enterprise so much, why are the 30 percent who want to change that culture in charge?
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The 30 percent coalition did not start governing this country with the advent of Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. It has been in charge for years.

But the real tipping point was the financial crisis, which began in 2008. The meltdown presented a golden opportunity for the 30 percent coalition to attack free enterprise openly and remake America in its own image.

That's just from the first page of four. We all know this already but it's in the WaPo so it must be right and hopefully will be read and understood by those who have never seen the dangers of government control of the economy.

Dr Doom and the PIGS

Nouriel Roubini said the bubble would burst and it did. That's why he is known in economics circles as Dr Doom:

Just three years earlier, Roubini had been the object of derision in the economics community as he prophesied a US housing market crash, financial crisis and partial collapse of the banking sector. Today, as an adviser to governments and central bankers and much feted in the media, he's well aware of the power of being right.
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"The crisis is not over; we are just at the next stage. This is where we move from a private to a public debt problem," he says, his speech the mongrel drawl of a man who was born in Turkey to Iranian parents, raised in Israel and Italy and lives in New York.
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"We have to start to worry about the solvency of governments. What is happening today in Greece is the tip of the iceberg of rising sovereign debt problems in the eurozone, in the UK, in Japan and in the US. This...is going to be the next issue in the global financial crisis."

It already is. And Roubini claims to have foreseen it as far back as 2006.

"I was writing about the PIGS [Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain] six to nine months before everyone else, I was worried about the future of the monetary union back in 2006," he says. "At the World Economic Forum I outraged a policy official by suggesting the monetary union might break up."
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"People asked me why I saw there was a bubble and my question was why others didn't. During the bubble everybody was benefiting and losing a sense of reality," he says.

I guess economics is not known as the "dismal science" for nothing.

Pistachios

Handful of pistachios could destroy cholesterol:

Professor Penny Kris-Etherton, of Pennsylvania State University, said: "Our previous study showed the benefits of pistachios in lowering lipids and lipoproteins, which are a risk factor for heart disease.

"This new study shows an additional effect of pistachios so now there are multiple health benefits of eating pistachios."

She and colleagues found pistachios are much richer in the main dietary antioxidants lutein, beta-carotene and gamma-tocopherol than other nuts.

I used to eat them regularly but grew bored with them and started eating peanuts and cashews which have much more flavor. I guess I'll have to start eating pistachios again. Maybe sprinkle them with some cayenne pepper and garlic powder?

Train rides

21 Train Trips Around the World:

The Palace on Wheels

India’s Palace on Wheels train strives to be pretty much that: a rail experience that lets its customers feel like maharajas. The train is equipped with luxury items and rich décor, and places an emphasis on the culture of the state of Rajasthan, through which it travels. The train’s weeklong itinerary takes passengers to some of the great sites of India’s heritage, including the Taj Mahal, the "Pink City" of Jaipur and the marble palaces of Udaipur.

The Eastern & Oriental Express

The plush Eastern & Oriental Express train prides itself on its luxury — including inlaid paneled walls of cherry wood in the cabins — but the lush scenery it passes is even more striking. The train follows a number of routes linking Malaysia, Thailand, Laos and Singapore, running through tropical rain forests and mountains, and passing temples, rubber plantations and rice paddies. The cabins boast huge picture windows perfect for getting acquainted with the gorgeous lands the train travels through.

The Coast Starlight Express

The trains on this Amtrak route are somewhat utilitarian, but the scenery is gorgeous. The Coast Starlight runs between Seattle and Los Angeles, showing off such sights as the Cascade range, verdant forests, the desert areas of Northern California, and volcanoes such as Mount Shasta and Mount Rainier. Just south of Sacramento, the route jogs over to the coast, and from Oakland southward — especially south of San Luis Obispo — are magnificent stretches of Pacific coastline.

The Blue Train

The Blue Train is an institution in South Africa: Its roots go back to the 1920s, when it shuttled passengers between Johannesburg and Cape Town. Refurbished in 1997, the elegant train — it bills itself as “a magnificent moving five-star hotel” — now runs between Pretoria and Cape Town, providing a 1,000-mile tour through the heart of South Africa. The beautiful landscape it passes includes such features as the dry Karoo region, the Highveld plateau, and grasslands and thickets.

I always loved travelling by train and I sure would like to take all 21 of these trips. I have not been on the Blue Train but I have travelled on the same route to Cape Town on the Orange Express when we moved from the Orange Free State to Cape Town when I was 7 years old. My dad had already gone ahead to his new job in Cape Town and to find us a place to live.

I travelled in a four bed cabin with my mom, granny, sister, three dogs, two parakeets, a canary and my treasured shoebox full of silkworms. The 1,000 mile trip lasted for 4 days and 3 nights and I loved every minute of it - even when granny's poodle pooped in the cabin before we could take her for a walk at the next station.

A song for Pentecost

Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) - Loquebantur variis linguis (They spoke in various tongues):

European socialism on it's death-bed?

If the NYT says so maybe it's true:

PARIS — Across Western Europe, the “lifestyle superpower,” the assumptions and gains of a lifetime are suddenly in doubt. The deficit crisis that threatens the euro has also undermined the sustainability of the European standard of social welfare, built by left-leaning governments since the end of World War II.

Europeans have boasted about their social model, with its generous vacations and early retirements, its national health care systems and extensive welfare benefits, contrasting it with the comparative harshness of American capitalism.

Europeans have benefited from low military spending, protected by NATO and the American nuclear umbrella. They have also translated higher taxes into a cradle-to-grave safety net. “The Europe that protects” is a slogan of the European Union.
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With low growth, low birthrates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle, at least not without a period of austerity and significant changes. The countries are trying to reassure investors by cutting salaries, raising legal retirement ages, increasing work hours and reducing health benefits and pensions.
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Figures show the severity of the problem. Gross public social expenditures in the European Union increased from 16 percent of gross domestic product in 1980 to 21 percent in 2005, compared with 15.9 percent in the United States. In France, the figure now is 31 percent, the highest in Europe, with state pensions making up more than 44 percent of the total and health care, 30 percent.
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More broadly, many across Europe say the Continent will have to adapt to fiscal and demographic change, because social peace depends on it. “Europe won’t work without that,” said Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister, referring to the state’s protective role. “In Europe we have nationalism and racism in a politicized manner, and those parties would have exploited grievances if not for our welfare state,” he said. “It’s a matter of national security, of our democracy.”

The French Revolution is the basis of European socialism. Revolting peasants have simply been replaced by union gangsters and welfare parasites who are just as barbaric as the French masses who cheered guillotining. The elites know that without socialism (and enforced political correctness) there could be another Reign of Terror or another Nazi dictatorship. Now, they're up a creek with no paddle.

Saturday dining rooms