Afghanistan's dirty little secret

"How can you fall in love if you can't see her face," 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. "We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful."

Joel Brinkley:

Western forces fighting in southern Afghanistan had a problem. Too often, soldiers on patrol passed an older man walking hand-in-hand with a pretty young boy. Their behavior suggested he was not the boy's father. Then, British soldiers found that young Afghan men were actually trying to "touch and fondle them," military investigator AnnaMaria Cardinalli told me. "The soldiers didn't understand."

All of this was so disconcerting that the Defense Department hired Cardinalli, a social scientist, to examine this mystery. Her report, "Pashtun Sexuality," startled not even one Afghan. But Western forces were shocked - and repulsed.

For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means "boy player." The men like to boast about it.

It's no wonder that the boys then grow up to be psycho terrorists. Jamie Glazov wrote about this nine years ago: The Sexual Rage Behind Islamic Terror.

The Koch brothers

Soros supposedly spent millions to get Obama elected. The Koch brothers are spending millions to get rid of Obama.

David Koch his brother Charles are lifelong libertarians and have quietly given more than a hundred million dollars to right-wing causes.

The article (in the The New Yorker) attempts to demonize the Koch brothers but ignore the smirking and read the facts.

Chuckle of the day

Boortz:

Do you know what small business owners - the principal job creators in our economy - talk about over their morning coffee? They're laughing their butts off at Obama's promise to eliminate their capital gains taxes. Hell ... most of them; the vast majority of them don't PAY capital gains taxes! What does it matter to them if capital gains taxes are eliminated? This is like telling hookers you're going to eliminate their unemployment insurance taxes.

Drunk baboons plague Cape Town's exclusive suburbs

Baboons are bad enough when they're not drunk and not even a blast of a vuvuzela seems to frighten them:

The sun is setting over South Africa's oldest vineyard and the last of the wine-tasting tourists are climbing onto their buses. But one large family group has no intention of leaving – and there is little the management can do about it.

Groot Constantia, in the heart of Cape Town's wine country, can deal with inebriated holidaymakers – but it is invading baboons which have developed a taste for its grapes that the wine makers are struggling with.

Each day, dozens of Cape Baboons gather to strip the ancient vines – the sauvignon blanc grapes are a particular favourite – before heading into the mountains to sleep. A few, who sample fallen fruit that has fermented in the sun, pass out and don't make it home.
...
It is not just the vineyards in South Africa which are under siege, however, but also the exclusive neighbouring suburb of Constantia, home to famous residents including Earl Spencer, Wilbur Smith and Nelson Mandela.
...
Before laws afforded baboons a protected status a decade ago, troublesome animals were regularly killed or maimed by home owners and farmers. Now around 20 full-time "baboon monitors" are employed to protect them and guide them away from residential areas. It has proved mission impossible. Last week, a 12 year old boy was left traumatised after confronting a troop who had broken into his family home.

Hearing noises from the kitchen, he went to investigate and found the beasts ransacking cupboards. When the child fled upstairs to find his babysitter, three males gave chase and surrounded him as he made a tearful phone call to his mother, while the animals pelted him with fruit.
...
Chickens, geese, peacocks and even a Great Dane dog have been killed in recent weeks by the marauding baboons - the males have huge and terrifying canine teeth. Roof tiles, electric fences, orchards and vegetables gardens have been trashed.

"Lunch parties in the garden are now just impossible," a homeowner complained. "It is so unrelaxing. Rather than chatting over our meal, we are looking over our shoulders and bolting the food as quickly as we can before it is stolen. We can't even leave a window open in summer. We are under siege."

Farmhouses

Restoring honor

I see that 300,000 people attended Beck's rally in DC but only 3,000 attended Sharpton's protest.

Photo of the mall by Clint Cox via Ace.

Churchill the "romantic conservative"

From The making of Winston Churchill by Adam Gopnik:

The revisionism from Churchill’s own side is more marked; some on the British right even see him as the man who helped lose the Empire in a self-intoxicated excess of oratory that was the sort of thing only Americans would take seriously. It is typical of what his American fans can miss that a writer for the Wall Street Journal recently quoted Gore Vidal calling Evelyn Waugh a kind of prose Churchill, and thought this flattering to Waugh. In fact, Waugh disliked Churchill, prose and politics alike—his alter ego, Guy Crouchback, calls him “a professional politician, a master of sham-Augustan prose, a Zionist, an advocate of the popular front in Europe, an associate of the press-lords and of Lloyd George”—and his dry-eyed, limpid, every-pebble-in-its-place language was utterly remote from Churchill’s sonorous, neo-Latinate sentences, and meant to be so.
...
He is, with de Gaulle, the greatest instance in modern times of the romantic-conservative temperament in power. The curious thing is that this temperament can at moments be more practical than its liberal opposite, or than its pragmatic-conservative twin, since it rightly concedes the primacy of ideas and passions, rather than interests and practicalities, in men’s minds. Churchill was a student of history, but one whose reading allowed him to grasp when a new thing in history happened.

The essay is in the New Yorker and therefore very long but it's most enjoyable.

The face of American Fascism

From The New American Corporate State by Warren Meyer at Forbes:

A troika of big government, big business and big labor is attempting to run the country to its own advantage.

Opponents of President Barack Obama and the Nancy Pelosi Congress will often accuse them of being "socialist." I find that this term is unhelpful, as many folks use direct government takeover of industrial enterprises as the litmus test for socialism, and thus will reject this hypothesis about the president. It is more useful to think of this administration as pursuing a European-style corporate state, a form of political economy that allows the state to exert strong control in the economy while maintaining a nominal façade of private ownership.

While the intellectual origins of the corporate state go back much further, the first serious attempt to implement such a system was in 1920s Italy by Benito Mussolini. Under that system, state-sponsored industry cartels programmed every aspect of economic life, from wages and working conditions to prices, production levels and product specifications. Nearly every commercial action required a government license, which would be denied to those who showed insufficient loyalty to the state and its goals.

In the United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was almost certainly an admirer of Mussolini's economic system, as he copied many of its salient features into the code authorities and commercial licensing requirements of the National Industrial Recovery Act (which eventually was struck down by the Supreme Court). Prices, wages, production quotas and, in effect, nearly every detail of business practices in an industry were to be set by small groups of government, labor and industry leaders. The president was given the power to unilaterally revoke the right to do business, without any further due process, of any enterprise in America if it refused to conform to this reincarnation of the Medieval guild system.

Mussolini called his system Fascism.

From Oikophobia by James Taranto in the WSJ:

Why the liberal elite finds Americans revolting.

What is the nature of this contempt? In part it is the snobbery of the cognitive elite, exemplified by a recent New York Times Web column by Timothy Egan called "Building a Nation of Know-Nothings"--or by the viciousness directed at Sarah Palin, whose folksy demeanor and state-college background seem terribly déclassé not just to liberals but to a good number of conservatives in places like New York City.

In more cerebral moments, the elitists of the left invoke a kind of Marxism Lite to explain away opinions and values that run counter to their own. Thus Barack Obama's notorious remark to the effect that economic deprivation embitters the proles, so that they cling to guns and religion.
...
The British philosopher Roger Scruton has coined a term to describe this attitude: oikophobia. Xenophobia is fear of the alien; oikophobia is fear of the familiar: "the disposition, in any conflict, to side with 'them' against 'us', and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours.' " What a perfect description of the pro-mosque left.

Call it whatever you want but it still boils down to the fact that there really are some deluded Americans who think of themselves as aristocratic rulers not simply fellow citizens in a democratic republic.

Where the rich live

Dylan Matthews:

The Census Bureau helpfully puts out data (see 690) on household income distribution by state, but unfortunately the highest category they include is households making over $200,000 a year. However, this is the group that will face higher rates if Obama's tax proposal succeeds, so it's worth examining.

About 3.96 percent of American households make over $200,000 a year. Thirty-eight states have lower percentages than that, and twelve and the District of Columbia have higher ones. Seven states have a percentage of less than 2 percent (West Virginia is lowest with 1.36 percent), 21 have a percentage between 2 and 3 percent, 11 have one between 3 and 4 percent, and four have one between 4 and 5 percent. New York and Virginia are both at about 5.6 percent, and California and Massachusetts are around 6.2 percent. Maryland is at 6.8 percent, New Jersey at 7.46 percent, Connecticut at 7.95 percent, and D.C. tops the list with 8.37 percent. Here's a handy map showing where states fall:

Henry Morton Stanley

You know: the guy who went hunting for Livingstone and, when he found him, said, "Dr Livingstone, I presume."

From Stanley was more hero than colonialist brute:

Critics who have condemned a planned statue of Henry Morton Stanley are misguided, says Tim Butcher.

His 1874-77 journey, charting the Congo river, started the Scramble for Africa. Before Stanley, the white man had been largely content to nibble at the edges, staking little more than ports such as Freetown, Cape Town and Mombasa. After Stanley, the white man went inland.
...
What makes Stanley a special case? After his first Congo journey it is true that he did return as the colonial agent for the Belgian king, Leopold II. What Leopold then got up to in the Congo was at the darker end of the spectrum of colonial cruelty – his agents hacked hands off natives pour encourager les autres to drive up harvesting of natural rubber, and they armed tribe against tribe. It was this horror that Joseph Conrad saw in 1890 when he skippered a boat down the Congo, something that burnt in his soul for nine years before it spilled so memorably onto the pages of his novel Heart of Darkness.

But in all this, Stanley's role was that of sorcerer's apprentice. He might have created something that went on to do awful things, but that happened years after he left. Perhaps he deserves opprobrium for hoodwinking chiefs into ceding sovereignty. If that is the standard, then just about every early American president should be pilloried for conning native Americans out of their land.

Welsh explorer and journalist Sir Henry Morton Stanley with his adopted son Kalulu:

The housing bubble

From The Economist - which, like a broken clock, is right at least twice a day:

If you ask me, the ultimate culprit in the financial crisis was the American cult of home-ownership. There are many ways to help poorer Americans accumulate wealth, such as channeling payroll taxes into personal retirement accounts. But we don't do that. Instead, because we consider it a humiliating indignity not to have a room or ten of our own, we subsidise home-buying six ways to Sunday and tell banks they won't have to suffer the downside of loans offered to bad credit risks. I think it's safe to say that this hasn't turned out to be the best scheme for helping poorer Americans into the ownership class.

This chart from Daniel Indiviglio's Home Prices May Drop Another 25% says it all:

Several weeks ago, Barry Ritholtz posted the following chart. It was originally featured by the New York Times, and updated by a commenter to Ritholtz's blog named Steve Barry.

I couldn't have said it better

A reader writes to Chris Bodenner:

I'm what most would consider a fairly conservative Evangelical Christian pastor. And I firmly believe in the right of homosexuals to have every civic right that any other citizen of this nation enjoys. I believe that gays and lesbians should be able to marry, to pass on benefits to their partners, and so on. If they are Americans, then they should enjoy the same rights as every American, regardless of what I think of their lifestyle.

But I do believe that homosexual behavior is sinful, and I do believe the Bible when Paul reaffirms the sinful nature of homosexual activity. I believe that some activities are not God-pleasing and yet can still be a "right" in our civic understanding. A good number of Christians in my generation (Gen X) believe similarly.

For the past several years, we've been hearing more and more from the gay community that they don't care what we think of their sexual practices, as long as we agree that they should have the same rights as everyone else. That sounds great, and like a goal I can work towards. But then, we catch glimpses like this commenter. And Andrew slips into this kind of talk sometimes as well. And it begins to cast real doubt on how much I can trust the rhetoric coming from the gay community. Here is an evangelical saying basically what I have encapsulated, that while he disagrees with the lifestyle he realizes he has been unloving in his attitude. That while he can disagree with the sin that someone commits, perhaps the best tactic is to try and accept them on the basis of their humanity and express kindness, despite the differences.

And what do we get for it? "Sorry, that's not good enough. Not only must you allow us to live as every other citizen, but you must also believe in your heart that homosexuality isn't a sin." Really? What happened to all the talk of tolerance?

After all, isn't tolerance a two-way street? Doesn't tolerance have to also mean that the homosexual community must accept the fact that I might disagree with their lifestyle? They will have to tolerate the fact that I disagree with them, even as I argue for equal civic rights. Apparently not. Instead, I read something like this poster's (and many others who have responded on this site) opinion and apparently I'm not allowed to have a belief that s/he finds unfashionable.

So I must bend my personal held beliefs to the will of others who find my thoughts judgmental or condemning. This attitude is repulsive and does nothing to benefit the cause of gay rights or to build bridges between communities. It is a selfishness that only causes many of my Christian friends to shake their heads. And it places little seeds of doubt in our minds about how wise it is to continually put ourselves out in front of our Christian peers as apologists for the gay community.

Precisely. I have wanted to write an explanation for my attitude towards this subject.

I know that Christians regard me as a sinner. I also know that I have to live with that. I don't expect acceptance. I don't really even expect tolerance. All I expect is that my civil rights as defined by law and my natural rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as an individual are respected just as I respect the civil and natural rights of my fellow citizens.

That's why I'm allergic to socalled "gay rights." There is no such thing. Mind you I'm also allergic to "women's rights" and "black rights." Group identity "rights" are for people who haven't got the balls to defend their individual rights. Unionists, gays, feminists and many blacks are basically shake-down artists and bullies.

The real problem isn't Islam or Muslims but Western Marxists

Before dinner I wrote:

I propose that those followers of Mahomed who wish to be accepted as Americans should start by calling themselves Mahomedans. That way they distance themselves from fanatical Islamists in the same way as those of us who call ourselves "cultural Christians" distance ourselves from organized Christianity.

During dinner the three merry men were talking about this and I realized that the phrase "organized Christianity" is incorrect. It's more about "cultural Christians" distancing themselves from scriptural literalism which some call "fundamentalism." Even Jews have distanced themselves from certain passages in the Old Testament. I don't know any Jews or Christians who stone adulteresses and homosexuals to death nowadays. But I do know quite a few Christians (and even Jews) who eat shrimps and pork now that we have refrigeration.

I'd be quite happy if civilized Mahomedans would simply distance themselves from the more primitive aspects of the Koran just as enlightened Jews and Christians have done so with the less savory aspects of their scriptures for nearly five hundred years.

That will happen eventually and jihadism will be seen as just a blip on the screen of history. Meantime we're stuck with the fact that the majority of Muslims are semi-literate peasants. Yes, there is a large Muslim middle-class but it is a fake middle-class only recently created by oil wealth. Too many boy- and goat-fucking peasants became too rich too quickly. They are half-baked. Their education is skin-deep. Their big-mouthed imams are basically madmen.

The problem isn't Mahomedans. The problem is the literal interpretation of primitive "scriptures" by a small bunch of raving religious lunatics. Of course that is compounded by the fact that Western communists have exploited Muslim rage at Israel.

And that brings me full circle to my contention that the real problem isn't Islam or Muslims but Western Marxists who only love peasants when they are revolting.

Islamophobia - a modest proposal

On the news now: 50% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Islam. But this year there were only 123 "hate crimes" against Mahomedans whereas there were over a thousand against Jews.

This is because most Americans are kind, polite, easy-going, live and let live people.

(We all take it for granted but recently my son and his lady friend visited me from England and were amazed at how kind and polite Americans are.)

Any Americans who have Mahomedan neighbors know that most Mahomedans are pretty ordinary human beings. Most come to America for the same reasons that most immigrants come: to give their children more opportunity.

I've known quite a Mahomedans. There are plenty of Mahomedans in South Africa. Some came from India to Natal in the 1800s when both India and Natal were British colonies. Earlier Mahomedans were brought from Sumatra by the Dutch East India Company to the Cape in the 1700s as slaves - they are known as Cape Malays.

BTW - I call them Mahomedans because that's what I grew up calling them. Of course I knew that their religion was called Islam and that they were sometimes known as Muslims but, in South Africa, they called themselves Mahomedans just as some of us call ourselves Christians.

It seems that the words Muslim and Islam slowly replaced the words Mahomedan and Mahomedanism in the past few decades with the rise of jihadism. In my mind Mahomedans are regular folk. Muslims are angry, envious, hate-filled fanatics with huge chips on their shoulders.

The Muslims with whom I grew up did not force their women to wear burhkas, hijabs and all those those other hideous disfiguring garbs. Some of the more old-fashioned women partially covered their heads with beautiful scarves. Many of the Mahomedan women I knew in South Africa were lawyers and physicians.

But, with the rise of fanatical fundamentalist sharia and jihadism, many educated, liberated women have been forced to hide under scary black robes again.

I don't think most Americans are Islamophobic. I do think that most of us feel that sharia is as bad as apartheid and totally un-American. It's ugly, scary, primitive and the complete antithesis of individual freedom and - the most awful un-American sin - it's anti-fun and boring.

I propose that those followers of Mahomed who wish to be accepted as Americans should start by calling themselves Mahomedans. That way they distance themselves from fanatical Islamists in the same way as those of us who call ourselves "cultural Christians" distance ourselves from organized Christianity.

Quote of the day

James Poulos:

Conor, you got my wheels turning this morning... you end with the right provocation:

Here's one succinct way to put the question to Tea Party leaders: if we're choosing our ruling class the wrong way now, what alternative do you recommend?

My answer would begin with Tim Carney's latest for the Examiner: "The Republican Divide: K Street vs. the Tea Partiers." Tim lays bare the nature of the divide, which is more profound than mere politics:

Lott’s proposed co-opting is not primarily ideological — Norton and Grayson, and their inside-the-Beltway patrons are all fairly conservative. The main distinction between Team Lott and Team DeMint might have less to do with policy platforms and more to do with a politician’s attitude toward the Washington nexus of power and money.

I think it's consistent with the intuitions and judgments powering the tea parties to answer your pregnant question like this: it's not that we're choosing our ruling class the wrong way; it's that our ruling class is the wrong kind of people. They have the wrong character, the wrong disposition, the wrong objectives, the wrong -- values. The problem isn't that 'politics is broken'. That's a symptom of the real problem, which is that the ruling culture of our ruling elites is broken.

If that's right, how did we get here?

The answer takes us back to the difference between liberalism and progressivism. Those who would remind us of this difference range from Claire "I'm a liberal" Berlinski to avowed lefty liberal public intellectual Alan Wolfe. As I wrote in my American Spectator review of Wolfe's revealing book The Future of Liberalism:

Wolfe recognizes that liberalism is most threatened today not by boring conservatism but by fashionable progressivism, in its twin emotional and scientific strains.

Maybe I should have titled this "Quotes of the day" since I not only quote James Poulos but Conor Friedersdorf, Tim Carney and Alan Wolfe. But this is the real quote of the day from Poulos:

The central philosophical proposition of the tea parties is that the Republican Party establishment has too many elites who have become untethered from those principles and have been born and raised in the wrong culture of elitehood. Whether by coincidence or for some other reason, this organizing conviction resonates extremely powerfully with the contention that the central conflict in American politics is between those who see political liberty as our most precious possession and those who see political liberty as an outdated obstacle to true justice and flourishing.

Precisely. The GOP morphed from the party of the Free Soil farmers to the party of Big Business but most Republicans are middle-class workers and small businessmen. It's time to get back to our roots.

Today's headlines

Scientists create 'dry water':

The substance resembles powdered sugar and could revolutionise the way chemicals are used.

Each particle of dry water contains a water droplet surrounded by a sandy silica coating. In fact, 95 per cent of dry water is ''wet'' water.

I hope it's better than that bilge known as non-alcoholic beer.

It Pays to Riot in Europe:

Ireland must now pay more than Greece to borrow.

Dublin has played by the book. It has taken pre-emptive steps to please the markets and the EU. It has done an IMF job without the IMF. Indeed, is has gone further than the IMF would have dared to go.

It has imposed draconian austerity measures. The solidarity of the country has been remarkable. There have no riots, and no terrorist threats.

Yet as of today it is paying 5.48pc to borrow for ten years, or near 8pc in real terms once deflation is factored in. This is crippling and puts the country on an unsustainable debt trajectory if it lasts for long.

Yet Greece is able to borrow from the EU at 5pc and from the IMF at a staggered rate far below that (still too high for the policy to work, but that is another matter). These were the terms of the €110bn joint bail-out.

To add insult to injury Ireland is having SUBSIDIZE Greece to meet its share of the rescue fund.

I am sure you can all see the absurdity of this. It has moral hazard written all over it, and shows what happens once a dysfunctional system twists itself into ever greater knots rather confronting the core issue.

Yes, I know that the Irish and Greek maturities are different but the fact is that Greece has extracted better terms by letting matters get further out of hand.

Well, as anybody who has studied history knows, there are very few true Greeks left. Modern Greeks are basically uncircumcised Turks - and revolting in more ways than one.

And while we're on the subject of real Greeks, Odysseus was one.

Greeks discover Odysseus' palace in Ithaca, proving Homer's hero was real:

Odysseus – known to the ancient Romans as Ulysses – famously took 10 years to return home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy.

On his journey, he was twice shipwrecked and encountered a cyclops, the spirit of his mother and tempting Sirens before returning to Ithaca, where he found his wife, Penelope, under pressure to remarry from a host of suitors who had invaded the royal palace.

With the help of his father, Laertes, and his son, Telemachus, he slaughtered his rivals and re-established his rule.

But despite the fantastical details in the Greek epic, a team of archaeologists has claimed the tale is anchored in truth - and that they have discovered his home on the island of Ithaca, in the Ionian sea off the north-west coast of Greece.

Nearly 3,000 years after Odysseus returned from his journey, the team from the University of Ioannina said they found the remains of an extensive three-storey building, with steps carved out of rock and fragments of pottery. The complex also features a well from the 8th century BC, roughly the period in which Odysseus is believed to have been king of Ithaca.

The location "fits like a glove" with Homer's description of the view from the fabled palace, the archaeologists claim.

As for a modern-day Greek tragedy - how about the BP scandal? Greek tragedy was always brought about by "hubris" which is nowadays translated as "pride" but which originally meant "disrespectful touching" or something actually closer to our concept of "assault and battery."

Oil spill safety valve was wrongly plumbed on rig, says BP executive:

Harry Thierens, BP’s vice president for drilling and completions, told a US political hearing that the blowout preventer was connected to a test pipe, rather than the correct one.

“It would mean that the pipe rams could not be closed,” Mr Thierens said in evidence to a federal panel on Wednesday. “I was frankly astonished that this could have happened.”

You don't say! I'm shocked I tell you - just shocked to the core. I guess you can tell that I'm one Republican who has no sympathy for Big Business. Like government, mega-corporations are a necessary evil and must be carefully watched to preserve our liberty.

More on the Mosque Debate

Jim Harper:

There is a strategic dimension to the story. This episode is signaling to audiences around the world the current relationship between the United States and Islam. These audiences might support or oppose the United States and act accordingly to undermine or support terrorist groups. For these people, knowledge of a Muslim community, active in New York and proximate to Ground Zero, would help put the lie to the “clash of civilizations” narrative sought by al-Qaeda and its franchises, undercutting their support.

The debate itself sends signals: If the United States were predominantly anti-Muslim, this debate wouldn’t be happening. If our political leaders had the power to decide matters of religious observance, this debate wouldn’t be happening. The debate is helping to show Muslim populations around the world—who might not know otherwise—that we think and debate about these things, that we are a functioning democratic republic, and that our country is undecided about the position of Muslims in the United States or, at worst, weakly anti-Muslim.

The debate only sends signals to literate Mahomedans but sadly most are anything but.

PS I really wanted to say: "but sadly most are illiterate goat-fucking tribal pedophile peasants who like to stone women and hang gays."

PPS Maybe I should start a new blog called "Somebody has to say it." Nope - I'm an old-fashioned conservative who believes that some limitations are good.

Quote of the day

I'm sure a lot of you get Richard Viguerie's newsletter in your email as I do. Mostly I delete them without reading them but this time Viguerie's right:

The John McCain of 2009-10 was a McCain we had not seen since the mid-1990s. The Senator owes his victory to the pressure he received from conservatives and Tea Partiers. To receive that support, he had to give up his maverick positions that have sometimes given aid and comfort to the liberals. I'm sure Senator McCain knows very well that he would not have won if he had continued his reputation as the Democrats' favorite Republican.

"Nobody's perfect"

I just wrote:

Karl Rove, the opportunistic weasel behind the "wedge issues" strategy, of course has an inconveniently queer father (who, according to BoingBoing, also happens to be "a pioneer in fetish piercings".) Nobody's perfect as Joe E. Brown said to Jack Lemmon when he discovered that Lemmon was not a lady in "Some Like It Hot."

I guess, if I want to be truly open-minded and non-judgmental, I shouldn't call Rove a weasel. Problem is I'm extremely judgmental and moralistic. Rove is not a conservative. He's a radical and an opportunist and, like Lenin, believes that the end justifies the means. No it doesn't and it never has.

I'm convinced that Bush Jr will eventually go down in history as one of the good presidents. Sure he made mistakes (like hiring Rove) but he is basically a good and decent man. But the whole Rove connection was dirty and some of the dirt stuck to Bush who was vilified by the left as a right-wing nut - which is ironic because Bush is a very kind, loving and - yes, liberal (in the true sense) man.

The end never justifies the means. Using immoral tactics to achieve a (dubiously) moral end will always blow up in your face. Leave that to the Democratic Party.

As Shakespeare said: "Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is the last and greatest treason."

Ken Mehlman comes out of the closet

Yeah, I know I've been posting lots of gay stuff lately. My apologies to whomever this may offend but I really only have about a dozen regular readers and two of them are Chas and Andy, three are family, two are close friends and the others are oddball mini-bloggers, like me, whose blogs I read regularly. My excuse is that I'm am so weary of politics lately. So, yes, I'm posting silly gossip.













Bush Campaign Chief and Former RNC Chair Ken Mehlman says "I'm Gay":

Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he said in an interview. He agreed to answer a reporter's questions, he said, because, now in private life, he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage and anticipated that questions would arise about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California's ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition 8.

"It's taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life," said Mehlman, now an executive vice-president with the New York City-based private equity firm, KKR. "Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey, and for me, over the past few months, I've told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they've been wonderful and supportive. The process has been something that's made me a happier and better person. It's something I wish I had done years ago."

Privately, in off-the-record conversations with this reporter [Marc Ambinder] over the years, Mehlman voiced support for civil unions and told of how, in private discussions with senior Republican officials, he beat back efforts to attack same-sex marriage. He insisted, too, that President Bush "was no homophobe." He often wondered why gay voters never formed common cause with Republican opponents of Islamic jihad, which he called "the greatest anti-gay force in the world right now."
...
He was aware that Karl Rove, President Bush's chief strategic adviser, had been working with Republicans to make sure that anti-gay initiatives and referenda would appear on November ballots in 2004 and 2006 to help Republicans.

Karl Rove, the opportunistic weasel behind the "wedge issues" strategy, of course has an inconveniently queer father (who, according to BoingBoing, also happens to be "a pioneer in fetish piercings".) Nobody's perfect as Joe E. Brown said to Jack Lemmon when he discovered that Lemmon was not a lady in "Some Like It Hot."

Marc continues:

Mehlman, who has never married, long found his sexuality subject to rumor and innuendo. He was the subject of an outing campaign by gay rights activist Mike Rogers, starting when Mehlman was Bush's campaign manager. Rogers's crusades against closeted gay Republicans split the organized gay lobby in Washington but were undoubtedly effective: he drove several elected officials, including Virginia Rep. Ed Shrock, from office, pushed out a would-be presidential campaign manager for George Allen well before Allen was set to run, slung rumors about Sen. Larry Craig's sexual orientation well before Craig's incident in a Minneapolis airport bathroom, and even managed to make homosexuality a wedge issue within the party's activist circles.

As Mehlman said: "Bush was no homophobe." Neither is Laura.

“In 2004 the social question that animated the campaign was gay marriage. Before the election season had unfolded, I had talked to George about not making gay marriage a significant issue. We have, I reminded him, a number of close friends who are gay or whose children are gay. But at that moment I could never have imagined what path this issue would take and where it would lead," - Laura Bush.

Whether you like it or not, homocons are capitalist pigs and have money - and political parties need money. Well everybody does. Duh!

Hummingbirds

From How to Watch a Hummingbird - Mute Dancers by Diane Ackerman:

While most birds are busy singing a small operetta of who and what and where, hummingbirds are virtually mute. Such small voices don't carry far, so they don't bother much with song. But if they can't serenade a mate, or yell war cries at a rival, how can they perform the essential dramas of their lives? They dance. Using body language, they spell out their intentions and moods, just as bees, fireflies or hula dancers do. That means elaborate aerial ballets in which males twirl, joust, sideswipe and somersault. Brazen and fierce, they will take on large adversaries -- even cats, dogs or humans.

The rest of the essay is worth reading.

The Meaning of the Tea Party

William Voegeli:

Our new meritocratic masters have been more conspicuously smart than wise. They know a lot, but don't know what they don't know. Their self-regard as the modern Americans who are the "natural aristocrats" Jefferson looked for has left them with an exaggerated sense of their own noblesse, and a deficient awareness of their corresponding oblige. Their expectation that the rest of us will be deferential to their expertise, like citizens of European nations that are social but not especially political democracies, has triggered the Tea Party backlash, and the resurgence of the "Don't Tread on Me" spirit.
...
The movement's "ruling passion is a belief in the ability of the ordinary citizen to make decisions for himself or herself without the guidance or ‘help' of experts and professionals." We've delegated responsibility for our "core institutions"—public schools and colleges, health care, finance, retirement, government at all levels-to those experts, and all of them "cost more than we can pay," but "don't do what we need."
...
The Tea Party mission can be described in another way. What's at stake in the war conservatives have declared on Obamacare is not only 18% of our economy, but 100% of our polity. If the anger over what the Democrats enacted, and the way they passed it, is replaced by acquiescence, America will have taken a big step toward having not only policies but political processes that are indistinguishable from Europe's. If the people who brought you Obamacare are not rebuked in the elections of 2010 and 2012, they, emboldened, will pursue further social transformations, regardless of popular opposition. Our ruling elites will eagerly adopt their European counterparts' posture toward the people: You are wrong. We know better. We will do this, and you will like it. To permit Obamacare to stand is to permit such an assertion to go unchallenged, and guarantee that it will become routine. By their passivity, the people will be complicit in their own disempowerment. As Frederick Douglass said in 1857, "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them."

Why Right Wing News Is Sponsoring Homocon

John Hawkins:

Last week, after the announcement that RWN is sponsoring Homocon, people started asking me why RWN chose to promote that event.

After all, I'm against gays in the military, I'm a strong supporter of Prop 8, and I'm very much in favor of a Federal Marriage Amendment. So, why back a gay group that doesn't agree with me on any of those issues?

Well, let's start from scratch. First of all, RWN has a history of supporting gay conservatives. At one point or another, RWN has interviewed Andrew Sullivan (in his pro-war days), Tammy Bruce, Matt Sanchez, and Christopher Barron from GOProud. Additionally, Matt Sanchez has written for the website and B. Daniel Blatt from Gay Patriot still writes for RWN while Jeff Gannon and the blogger from the now defunct Boi from Troy were invited to participate in RWN's blogger polls. So, sponsoring an event like Homocon isn't a big break from what RWN has done in the past.

Moreover, from what I've seen of GOProud, it's an enormous improvement over the Log Cabin Republicans. Let me tell you why: the Log Cabin Republicans have some conservative members, but organizationally, they are a left-of-center gay group. They are funded by Democratic money and their agenda is almost identical to that of most of the liberal gay groups out there.

In all honesty, I don't consider the group to be conservative or even Republican in any meaningful sense. Keep in mind that this is the same group that even declined to endorse George W. Bush in 2004. Yet, take a look at all the establishment Republicans showing up for a Log Cabin Republican fundraiser just three days before Homocon:



After seeing that, isn't it a little ironic that Ann Coulter's appearance at Homocon is causing so much controversy?

Hawkins goes into a lot more detail and concludes:

Still, there's a world of difference between saying, "This is the Republican Party's position on this issue" and saying, "This is the Republican Party's position on this issue and to be a Republican, you have to agree with it." A political party that holds the former position can be both principled and have a big tent, while a political party that holds the latter position is doomed to purge heretics on one issue after the other until it dies an ignominious death. Additionally, no matter what your race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation may be, you should be welcomed into the Republican Party and the conservative movement. If there are people who don't agree with that, if there are people who think a gay conservative or a gay Republican is a contradiction of terms, then we're just never going to see eye-to-eye.

I really don't expect conservatives to ever approve of gays but as Reagan said: "an 80% friend is not a 20% enemy" and homocons believe in probably more than 80% of the GOP agenda. Some want gay "marriage" but many don't. From GOProud's website:

GOProud represents gay conservatives and their allies. GOProud is committed to a traditional conservative agenda that emphasizes limited government, individual liberty, free markets and a confident foreign policy. GOProud promotes our traditional conservative agenda by influencing politics and policy at the federal level.

On the other hand, the Log Cabin Club endorsed Kerry against Bush in 2004. I'm baffled that Cornyn and Sessions are involved.

Odd houses

From Recycled homes:

In 1994, a hairstylist in Benoit, Miss., named JoAnn Ussery lost her 1,400-square-foot house to an ice storm. Ussery had a relative who worked in aviation, and the two came up with the idea to salvage a Continental Airlines 727. It cost her $2,000 to buy the plane, $4,000 to move it to her lakeside lot, and about $24,000 to outfit it comfortably. Ussery did much of the renovation herself, and took advantage of the ample windows and storage bins, as well as the lavatory. Ussery told reporters that she was mainly attracted to the idea because of the plane's low cost and durability.

In the 1920s, a Southern California architect and recycler by the name of Miles Minor Kellogg built two distinctive homes in the shape of boats, out of bits of material he found locally.

From Cave houses:

Tucked into a 17,000-square-foot hole left by a sandstone mine in Festus, Mo., is the spacious, beautiful home of William "Curt" Sleeper, his wife, Deborah, and their three kids. The Sleepers almost lost their unique three-bedroom house to foreclosure, but they recently received backing from a private investor after media exposure.
...
He says he doesn't need to heat or cool the home because the natural insulation of the cave walls keeps the inside air 65 to 70 degrees year-round. The Sleepers constructed the façade of their dwelling out of 300 sliding glass doors purchased from a local resale shop. "I stripped the aluminum and resold it to the local recycle center," Sleeper adds. "We pull more than 100 gallons of water per day from the air with our dehumidifiers and then pump that outside to water our gardens and feed chickens."

For centuries, people lived in homes carved into the soft sandstone of the Kinver Edge escarpment, on the border of Staffordshire and Worcestershire in England. The most famous cluster was under Holy Austin Rock, which at one time served as a hermitage. The last cave dwellers moved out in the 1950s, but the site is preserved by the National Trust, which has restored some of the cave houses to the Victorian period.

Some observers have wondered if the cave homes and their small cottage gardens had inspired J.R.R. Tolkien in his imaginings of hobbits, since he grew up nearby.

Does Barack Obama want to be re-elected in 2012?

My hunch is that he's got bigger plans - like messiah aka savior of the whole world.

The man in the Oval Office, argues Toby Harnden, may already be preparing for a role as a post-president in a post-American world:

Almost everything Obama does these days suggests that he doesn't care much about being re-elected. Strange as it might seem, perhaps he wants to be a one-term president.
...
Obama does not suffer for self doubt. He has long seemed so convinced of his own virtue that to question his motives is illogical. Increasingly, his pronouncements carry the tone of one who believes those who disagree are stupid or bigoted.
...
For Obama, the crowning moment of his presidency have been speeches abroad - the statement in Strasbourg that America had been "dismissive and arrogant", the address to the Muslim world from Cairo, the acceptance in Oslo of the Nobel Peace Prize.

In Berlin in 2008, Obama cast himself as a "citizen of the world". He has dismissed the bedrock notion of American exceptionalism by describing it, also in Strasbourg, as little more than narrow patriotism. Elite opinion among liberal Ivy League types - of which Obama is the embodiment - holds that we are already living in a post-American world.

Obama has already achieved his goal: to weaken America. The only thing that may tempt him to run in 2012 is if he thinks he can destroy it with four more years of debt and socialism. Actually his real goal was achieved when he won in 2008. He simply wanted the title. His arrogant narcissism is sophomorically idiotic and his vanity knows no bounds.

John Adams on Thomas Paine

Cathleen Kaveny:

Adams wasn’t a big fan of Paine–envying his fame while worrying about his radical democratic ideals. And he objected to Paine’s increasingly pugnacious deism.

When he wanted to be, Adams was capable of what today would be seen as the highest level of snark. Here’s his comment on the title of Paine’s The Age of Reason:

I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity, as you do, and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Bonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from the Bottomless Pit, or anything but the Age of Reason. I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs or the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine.

Movie stars I loved as a kid - Gene Tierney

There was a Gene Tierney marathon on TMC last week. We recorded her movies and have started watching them.

Gene Eliza Tierney (November 20, 1920 – November 6, 1991):

While playing Anne Scott in The Left Hand of God (1955), opposite Humphrey Bogart, Tierney’s long string of personal troubles finally took its toll. She said that “Bogey could tell that I was mentally unstable.” During the production, he fed Tierney her lines and encouraged her to seek help. Worried about her mental health, she consulted a psychiatrist, and was admitted to Harkness Pavilion in New York. Later, she went to The Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut. After some 27 shock treatments, Tierney attempted to flee, but was caught and returned. She became an outspoken opponent of shock treatment therapy, claiming that it had destroyed significant portions of her memory.
...
Tierney married twice, first to costume and fashion designer Oleg Cassini on June 1, 1941. She and Cassini had two daughters, Antoinette Daria Cassini (born October 15, 1943) and Christina "Tina" Cassini (born November 19, 1948).

In June 1943, while pregnant with Daria, Tierney contracted rubella during her only appearance at the Hollywood Canteen. Daria was born prematurely in Washington, D.C., weighing only three pounds, two ounces (1.42 kg) and requiring a total blood transfusion. Because of Tierney's illness, Daria was also deaf, partially blind with cataracts and had severe mental retardation. Tierney's grief over the tragedy led to many years of depression and may have begun her bipolar disorder.

Some time after the tragedy surrounding her daughter Daria's birth, Tierney learned from a fan who approached her for an autograph at a tennis party that the woman (who was then a member of the women's branch of the Marine Corps) had sneaked out of quarantine while sick with rubella to meet Tierney at her only Hollywood Canteen appearance. In her autobiography, Tierney related that after the woman had recounted her story, she just stared at her silently, then turned and walked away. She wrote, "After that I didn't care whether ever again I was anyone's favorite actress."

Biographers have theorized that Agatha Christie used this real-life tragedy as the basis of her plot for The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side. The incident, as well as the circumstances under which the information was imparted to the actress, is repeated almost verbatim in the story. Tierney's tragedy had been well-publicized for years previously. During this time, Howard Hughes, an old friend, saw to it that Daria received the best medical care available, paying for all of her medical expenses. Tierney never forgot Hughes' acts of kindness.

Tierney separated from Cassini, challenged by the marital stress of Daria's condition, but they later reconciled and had a second daughter, Tina. During her separation, during the filming of Dragonwyck, she met a young John F. Kennedy, who was visiting the set. They began a romance that ended the following year, when Kennedy told her he could never marry her because of his political ambitions. Tierney then reconciled with Cassini, but they divorced on February 28, 1952. In 1960, Tierney sent Kennedy a note of congratulations on his election victory; she later admitted that she had voted for Richard Nixon, saying, "I thought that he would make a better president."

Quote of the day

From Dee at Conservatism with Heart:

Even Moderate Muslims admit, "We Muslims know the Ground Zero mosque is meant to be a deliberate provocation." After visiting the OKC Bombing Memorial I can't imagine something across the street in honor of Timothy McVeigh.

Precisely.

Saturday houses - more beach cottages

Joseph Farah vs Ann Coulter

Farah's website is WorldNetDaily. Ace posted an email that Farah wrote to Coulter about her acceptance of an invitation to speak at Homocon:

Whether you believe it or not, or whether or not it is your intent, your acceptance of this speaking engagement is affirming GOProud, which is, I'm sure you've noticed, winning the hearts and minds in the conservative movement – with CPAC, Grover Norquist and others who don't necessarily bring a Judeo-Christian worldview to the party. GOProud is having a field day marketing you and legitimizing itself further in the conservative movement through its association with you.

It's a very big deal, Ann, and it's bigger than you. Glenn Beck threw in the towel last week on same-sex marriage, saying since it doesn't affect him, it doesn't matter. Materialistic utilitarianism – much of the conservative movement is moving in that direction.

I believe this is a time when God is calling his people to stand up for what's right.

Ace comments:

Here's what I think of Farah's position: It's poison. It's not merely political poison, it is moral poison.
...
The GOP cannot be an overtly, officially religious party charged with monitoring everyone's personal sins. It cannot be. Ever. I view the party on morality as I view it on economics. A government cannot create wealth; it can only, and should only endeavor to, foster a wealth-friendly environment in which wealth-creation is likely.

Similarly, a government cannot mandate what sort of sex is legal and what sex is illegal. It can only foster a morality-friendly environment win which moral behavior is likely.
...
Farah's position is essentially that gays simply cannot be conservatives at all and must be purged from the party. He does not seem to be an opponent of a policy, but an opponent of specific people. That doesn't strike me as fair, conservative, or keeping with the American way of doing things.

I can't help but notice that homosexuality is elevated to rather higher position on the food-pyramid of sins than seems necessary. I note that in my every day life, I wrestle with all sorts of sins: Sloth, probably at the top, then Lust, then Envy, then Wrath.... actually, all four of those are separated only by the slightest titches; it's nearly a four-way tie. Pride and Gluttony aren't far behind, either.

And other sins too. Premarital sex? Sex only for lustful purposes and not procreation? Yeah, I'm all about that.

I presume Joseph Farah is as well -- on that last point. I am not prepared to believe that he only engages in sex for purposes of creating children. I do not believe that is true of nearly anyone.

I'll tell you one sin I never have to wrestle with: the sin of homosexual fornication. Why? Because I'm straight. It never even occurs to me that gee, maybe if I'm not scoring with the ladies lately I should change up my game and try for a dude.

Never. Not once has it even crossed my mind.

And I submit that this is true for 99.9% of straight men, which in turn means it's true of 97.7% of men, period.

So Farah is essentially elevating to the position of Worst Sin the one sin he has absolutely zero chance of committing, zero chance of even being tempted by.

I find this breathtakingly convenient. According to Farah's priorities, hell, I'm a pretty moral guy -- never had gay sex, never wanted to have gay sex, never even thought about gay sex. So I'm pretty pure, right?

Of course I'm not. I'm just not guilty of that sin, but I'm not free of that sin due to devotion to God or exercise of willpower or the strengthening power of faith: I'm free of that sin for the same reason I'm free of the sin (were it a sin) of eating tarantulas. Because I don't want to.

...

By the way: Ann Coulter's been unmarried her whole life. And yet, at her age (I assume she's 29, like me; I mean, I will be 29, in November), she has dated a bunch of guys.

I don't want to invade her privacy: But am I to understand that Joseph Farah believes she was celibate throughout this time period? That her various boyfriends were content with some hand-holding and maybe some light necking?

Am I to understand he is that childishly naive?

So my question is: What was he doing keeping this shameless wanton hedonist whore on his payroll in the first place?

Ace is always a bit emphatic. I'm not sure if Farah's views are political and moral "poison." All I know is that he is entitled to his opinion but I don't like anyone telling me what God's opinion is. It's stuff like that that puts me off religion, churches and especially preachers. As soon as someone tells me that he knows what God thinks, I start thinking about the voodoo, witch-doctors and other primitive superstitious mumbo-jumbo that I saw growing up among the Zulus.

I see that Coulter has accused Farah of being a ‘publicity whore’:

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter responded today to the announcement that WorldNetDaily was dropping her as a speaker for one of their events, calling WorldNetDaily Editor Joseph Farah a “publicity whore” and a “swine.”

Coulter was bumped from the speakers list of WND’s September “Taking America Back National Conference ”after it was announced that she had accepted a speaking gig at a New York City party hosted by GOProud, a Washington-based group that represents gay conservatives.

“[F]arah is doing this for PUBLICITY and publicity alone,” Coulter wrote in an email to The Daily Caller on Wednesday afternoon.

WND posted an email exchange between Coulter and Farah in their public announcement that she would be removed from the list of speakers. Coulter expressed anger that he quoted her from their private email on the issue.

“[T]his was an email exchange [between] friends and even though I didn’t expressly say “OFF THE RECORD” and I believe everything I said, he’s a swine for using my private emails politely answering him.” Coulter wrote in the email to TheDC. “[W]hy would he do such a despicable thing? … for PUBLICITY.”

The conservative pundit said that WND is well known for making decisions just to get attention, citing the conspiracist site’s regular articles about President Obama’s birth certificate.

“I will say that [Farah] could give less than two sh-ts about the conservative movement — as demonstrated by his promotion of the birther nonsense (long ago disproved by my newspaper, human events, also sweetness & light, american spectator and national review etc, etc etc). He’s the only allegedly serious conservative pushing the birther thing. for ONE reason: to get hits on his website.”

Coulter added that she would not be losing anything from the dropped speaking engagement since WND had not been able to come up with the money to pay her anyway.

Ann may not be the "perfect conservative" but she's a damn good capitalist sow.

PS I'm not a total sinner. I don't eat pork.

The mosque - this made me think

Ace:

Kat from Missouri writes:

We are in the midst of losing an important ideological battle. A battle we cannot afford to lose because it is at the very heart of this war. The enemy believes that freedom and democracy, particularly the freedom of religion, is our most egregious sin and must be destroyed. He thinks it makes us weak.

We are, at this very moment, about to rip out one of our most basic freedoms and hand it to him on a silver platter.

I believe we should step aside and let the mosque be built. Not only that, we should defend their right to do so as we have defended nothing else. If we do not, we hand the enemy a powerful weapon that he can use to bloody us with again and again. He will use it to recruit more men by pointing to it as the truth of OUR oppression of "his" people, our hypocrisy to the very idea of freedom and its real weakness. Who knows how many of our men and women in or out of uniform will pay the price for this one moment?

I cannot and I will not abide handing the enemy this weapon.

Ace comments:

It would never even occur to me, or any decent person, to erect a Museum of American Achievements in Aviation in Hiroshima.

This is not a joke -- I am not saying a museum celebrating the bomb. I am saying a museum that does exactly as I said -- notes American achievements in aviation. Not the Enola Gay, but the Wright Brothers, etc.

The museum I am talking about, hypothetically, would not be baiting, nor celebratory of the bomb, in the least. It would just be a museum of American advancements in aviation.

But of course no sentient being could possibly fail to see how Japanese would take it as a direct provocation, and a nasty reminder of the bomb that fell on Hiroshima 6 August 1945.

And if I were so stupid, tasteless, and Asperger's-afflicted to have suggested such a museum in the first place, if Japanese then told me "That brings up horrifying memories," I wouldn't then arrogantly double-down and begin explaining to them how intolerant they're being, how irrational they're being, how unfair to my enthusiasm for American airpower they're being.

I would say, "Damn, I didn't think of that! I intended this as just a museum of aircraft, but I can in fact understand how you, a Hiroshima survivor, would even 50 years later have a rather more negative feeling about American airplanes in the sky that I do. Thank you for informing of this -- my bad. I'll put it up somewhere else."

Because -- why wouldn't I put it somewhere else.... unless my intent all along was in fact to remind Hiroshima residence of what happens when you defy the Big A? (A as in America.)

If I didn't have that in my heart, why would I want to visit such unwelcome and painful reminders on a population that experienced an awful tragedy 50 years ago at the hands of my fellow Americans?

There's not a lot that non-New Yorkers can do. Legally it's simply a local zoning issue. If they own the land then legally they can build the mosque. I still like the idea of building a gay Muslim nightclub next door - instead of go-go boys they can have dancing goats.

My son's visit

Chas and my son, Christian, took hundreds of photos. It was hard to pick from them.

Chris' lady friend, Eleanor/Ellie, and I at the port of Charleston. I liked her a lot:















Chris and Ellie:















Ellie and I at Shoreacres:















My son and I. I was that skinny too when I was his age:















Ellie and I outside the Logging Museum:















Lunch in the backyard:

















The weather was so nice that we had a outside a lot:

















The chip and the old block:

















Chris and Ellie and the three merry men of Robin's Wood. Chris liked my hat so had to give it to him:

The solution for bedbugs: DDT

I soon as I saw that my daily hits on my bedbug posts were going up again, I thought: "I bet bedbugs are in the news again." They are. There was panic in a Times Square movie theater last night when they closed it because of bedbugs.

Malaria and bedbugs were eliminated in South Africa when I was a kid. Then DDT was banned and they made a comeback. The irony is that some of the pesticides that replaced it were more dangerous than DDT.

Umpqua Dairy recall

Umpqua Dairy Products Co. are sold in Oregon, southwest Washington and northern California:

Umpqua, headquartered in Roseburg, Ore., instituted the milk products recall Wednesday after salmonellosis cases were linked to milk produced at its Roseburg plant.

RECALLED: Milk, half and half, cream and buttermilk as well as Umpqua Dairy brand gallon orange juice and fruit drinks are part of the recall.

NOT RECALLED: Ice cream and other dairy products, including sour cream and cottage cheese, are not being recalled.
...
Umpqua also sells under the labels: Cascade, Great Value, Lady Lee, Market of Choice and Sherm's. The company also supplies milk to Dairy Queens in Oregon and Washington. Those products that should be discarded or returned have a plant code 41-62 stamped on them. The recall affects milk, purchased on or prior to Monday, Aug. 16, 2010 or earlier or with an expiration date of Sept. 5, 2010 or earlier; buttermilk with an expiration date of Sept. 10, 2010, or earlier; orange juice and fruit drink with an expiration date of Sept. 15 or earlier.

Russell Kirk, founding father of modern conservatism

Shortly after the release of The Conservative Mind, he informed the administration at Michigan State that he didn’t want to return. He resettled in Mecosta and spent the rest of his days at the old farmstead, a home, barn and assorted outbuildings he called Piety Hill.

Russell Kirk Shaped Conservative Thought from a Northern Michigan Farm:

When Russell Kirk quit the faculty of Michigan State College in 1953, he owned one of the hottest résumés of any professor in the country. He had published more than a dozen articles in various journals that year—a fine achievement in the “publish or perish” world of higher education. More important, he was the author of a brand-new book, The Conservative Mind, which was winning rave reviews in all the right places. It would go on to become one of the most influential works of political thought in the 20th century and would position Kirk to eventually be regarded as a founding father of modern conservative thought. He was also relatively young—at just 34 years of age, Kirk stood at the dawn of what promised to be a long and bright career in academics.

Yet he gave it all up for an independent life of letters in rural Michigan. Kirk brushed aside overtures from several schools and instead he took up residence in “stump country,” a reference to what the lumberjacks had left behind years earlier.
...
At a time when conservative principles are reshaping American law and culture, it is difficult to imagine that half a century ago, the conservative movement barely existed. Its few adherents struggled against the widespread perception, voiced by 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill, that they comprised “the stupid party.” The literary critic Lionel Trilling equated conservative thought to “irritable mental gestures.”

Into this environment stepped Kirk, who claimed that conservatives were the inheritors of a proud tradition whose members included the likes of Edmund Burke, John Adams and Nathaniel Hawthorne. This genealogy was idiosyncratic as well as useful: it presented conservatives with an intellectual pedigree that they sorely needed.

“Before Kirk came along, conservatives didn’t even know what to call themselves,” said Lee Edwards, a historian at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. “After Kirk, they had a name for themselves.”

In The Conservative Mind, Kirk outlined a set of basic principles that defined conservatism, such as belief in a divine moral order, an understanding that private property and political freedom are linked, and a disapproval of radical change. Above
all, Kirk insisted on a deep respect for time-tested traditions: “Even the most intelligent of men cannot hope to understand all the secrets of traditional morals and social arrangements; but we may be sure that Providence, acting through the medium of human trial and error, has developed every hoary habit for some important purpose.” He often made this point by stating, simply, “The individual is foolish, the species is wise.”

Kirk was a strong supporter of conventionally conservative politicians such as Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and John Engler (who represented Mecosta in the Michigan legislature before becoming governor). Yet his brand of conservatism was
also distinctive. In its application, many of today’s conservatives would recognize only parts. Kirk regarded culture as far more important than economics—he rarely bothered himself with tax policy and viewed capitalism itself with some apprehension.

What’s more, he was so skeptical of foreign entanglements that he cast a presidential vote, in 1944, for Norman Thomas, a socialist and pacifist who opposed U.S. involvement in the Second World War. Later, Kirk criticized the Vietnam War in the 1960’s and the Gulf War in 1991.
...
Yet even in Mecosta there was the occasional comer. One of them was William F. Buckley, Jr., a young man who was planning to start a political magazine. He flew to Michigan in 1955 with the hope of persuading Kirk to become a columnist. Upon his arrival in Mecosta, Buckley stopped at a pay phone and asked for Dr. Kirk’s number.

“You looking for Russell?” inquired the operator. “He’s at the store right now.” The two men met and went out for dinner and drinks. Kirk accepted Buckley’s offer, beginning a formal association with National Review that would last for 25 years.

Mansions in the middle of nowhere

I liked these two:

Southways, Lake Minnetonka, Minn. $53 million

This historic, 40,000-square-foot home on 13 Minnesota acres dramatically outprices even the most expensive homes in the region, which may explain why it hasn't sold in more than two years on the market. Built in 1918, the nine-bedroom estate also has a greenhouse, a pool complex, a smoke room, a teahouse and lake views.

Medway Plantation, Charleston, S.C. $22 million

This Southern landmark has a price to rival Manhattan townhouses and Bel Air mansions, but is tucked into genteel Charleston. The six-bedroom, 18th-century home sits on nearly 7,000 lush acres, and has 10-foot ceilings, cypress-paneled walls and a professional kitchen. Outside the residence you'll find seven guest and staff homes, indoor and outdoor pools, a marina, a lodge, a stable, a greenhouse, traditional gardens and 13 lakes.

The land is lovely but one is too cold in winter and the other too hot in summer so you have to stay indoors half the year. And so much house means too many servants and too little privacy. Nooo - I don't have sour grapes. I like my double-wide in paradise.