Archive for the 'Commentary' Category
(Chronologically Listed)
- roast turkey (22.5 lbs)
- corn bread stuffing (water chestnuts, whole cranberries, sliced almonds, celery, onion)
- mashed potatoes (new potatoes, skin on, lots of butter)
- sweet potatoes kittichai (mashed sweet potatoes plus coconut milk)
- mixed steamed fresh veggies (green beans, broccoli, broccolini, brussle sprouts, carrots)
- homemade cheese sauce (Sandra’s contribution)
- roast acorn and delicata squash (1 each, small, mostly for the novelty)
- Pillsbury Grands! rolls (hey, gotta take a shortcut somewhere)
- homemade cranberry sauce (made with orange juice and fresh orange zest)
- homemade pumpkin and mince pies, with homemade whipped cream
Peace On Earth - Good Will To Men
I would like to say thank you to everyone who reads what Bruce Webster and I post here, and wish every one of you a Merry Christmas.
Even though times are a bit rough and likely headed rougher, it’s important to keep in mind that for christians like myself, we celebrate the birth of our lord, savior and redeemer. Popular culture has done more to belittle the christian faith in the last few years than at any time in my life.
But that should not diminish that it’s important for each of us to remember the simple yet profound lessons of Christ’s life. To treat each other with kindness, compassion and respect, especially those that have the most need.
Jesus did not draw a distinction between age, gender, parentage or nationality. He welcomed everyone to hear is his message of love and tasked each who would follow him to teach others to “Do to others as you would have them do to you”. This simple “11th Commandment” is profound in that it does not require lawyers or a stack of legal documents to describe. Yet in every day life it can sometimes be so difficult to enact.
Merry Christmas all, may you and your families all share a wonderful holiday this year.
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[from BruceW]: What he said. God bless us, everyone.
Thanksgiving Day menu
We have family and friends coming over for dinner (actually, two of our grandsons have been here since Sunday; we’ve been having a great time with the Wii, the ping pong table, and the air hockey table), a total of 10 people. Here’s what I’m fixing for dinner:
Note that “homemade” for the pies means Pillsbury roll-out crusts, jarred mince filling, and canned 100% pumpkin filling (plus requisite sugar, spices, eggs, and condensed milk). I actually made a pumpkin pie from scratch many years ago (e.g., cut up and cooked the pumpkin, made the crust from scratch, etc.), and I decided it’s just not worth the time and effort.
This is a feast day, and a day for giving thanks. I was going to write a longer posting about the meaning of this day, but then I remembered that I did that last year, so just consider that post included by reference. In spite of the current financial turmoil, we still live in the land of greatest opportunity and freedom. And with our son still over in Iraq, we are especially mindful and grateful for all the sacrifices made for those freedoms. God bless us, everyone. ..bruce w..
Wisdom from the past
I have recently been re-reading The Ancient State by Hugh Nibley and just this morning finished reading “The Hierocentric State” (originally published back in 1951 in Western Political Quarterly 4/2). The article itself suggests that key aspects of the vast nomadic cultures of Central Asia (e.g., the Mongols) were idealized and emulated by more sedentary civilizations to the east and west (e.g., China and Europe). But it was a passage in the final paragraph of the article that struck me as eerily reminiscent of the American political scene over the past year or two, particularly the Obama cult of personality. I’ve reformatted the text to better call out the separate links for each item (numbered in the original):
Men seem unable to leave the dream of a hierocentric state alone. To recapitulate the sections given above, we cannot blame people if they yearn for
(1) the granduer, color, and unity of the great assembly,
(2) the lofty and uncompromising certainty of universal kingship,
(3) the sense of refuge and well-being in the holy shrine,
(4) the high and independent life of a chivalrous aristocracy,
(5) the luxury of hating all opposition with a holy hatred, and
(6) the sheer authority of the institutions established and maintained by force. (pp. 133-134)
Food for thought. ..bruce w..
Daily Financial Moment Of Clarity
From the pages of Wall Street Journal via Greg Mankiw’s Blog, word of a sharp drop in the demand for mistresses for the rich and powerful:
And speaking of nailing it…
…Victor Davis Hanson pretty much pounds the nail on the head, ten times in a row:
1. Four years of high-school Latin would dramatically arrest the decline in American education….
2. Hollywood is going the way of Detroit….
3. All the old media brands of our youth have been tarnished and all but discredited….
4. After the junk bond meltdown, the S&L debacle, and now the financial panic, in just a few years the financial community destroyed the ancient wisdom….
5. California is now a valuable touchstone to the country, a warning of what not to do….
6. Something has happened to the generic American male accent….
7. We have given political eccentricity a bad name….
8. Do not farm. There is only loss….
9. As I wrote earlier, the shrill Left is increasingly far more vicious these days than the conservative fringe, and about like the crude Right of the 1950s….
10. The K-12 public education system is essentially wrecked….
Please do read the whole thing. Hanson and I are of an age (55), and in my humble opinion, he’s dead on. ..bruce w..
This is so on target
This guy pretty much nails it:
Flying still seems magical to me. Hat tip to Bad Astronomy. ..bruce w..
Words to live by…
Iowahawk Nails It
Iowahawk shows that brevity is the soul of wit:
So for now, let’s put politics aside and celebrate this historic milestone. In his famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial 45 years ago, Dr. King said “I have a dream that one day my children will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
Let us now take pride that Tuesday we Americans proved that neither thing matters anymore.
Democrats Win… Here Comes The Pain
McCain ran the weakest, most disorganized and least aggressive campaign I have seen since George Bush 41 vs. Clinton. He lost with pride and dignity - which is what he seems to have wanted to do from the start.
Obama is the president elect, congratulations to the first black president! As i said when I saw him speaking at the 2004 Democrat convention “That man will be our first black president”. My sole wish for Mr. Obama was that he please get some experience before he took office in the hopes that he could have also been a great president.
Now four years later, he is on course to be the 44th president earlier than I had hoped, making that mark of greatness harder to achieve. There are really 3 pieces to this win.
Democrat “Machine” Politics - we are likely to find that there was a huge amount of questionable activity surrounding all aspects of the election, only a fraction of which will be illegal, but the majority of which, if accurately investigated and reported, would disgust the American people. We will see if going forward the cowardly press is up to the task (today my money is on no). I would pin my hopes on the “new media”, but there is a strong chance that things like the mis-named “Fairness Doctrine” will stifle free speech enough to halt all of that.
Novelty of Breaking A Barrier - President Elect Obama is the first black man to win the office. This is a substantial achievement on a number of fronts. Once that novelty wears off, will Americans find that they can live with the significant implications of that choice? Some of the posturing from the Democrats in the last few weeks are quite worrisome. This includes confiscation of 401k accounts, deliberate dismantling of the coal / energy industry, direct and blatant restrictions on the freedom of speech (fairness doctrine), and probably others that I have been too busy to pick up on.
Republican Weakness - As I wrote in May of 2008, the public was not done punishing the Republicans. The Bush presidency had been sticking it to the conservative base for quite a while, and tonight the conservatives may have reminded the Republicans just how easy it is to win elections without them. Such affronts from the Bush team as the open borders policy, the Harriet Myers nomination, Dubai Ports World (the list goes on and on) have been towering failures of Bush and focused the conservative base on how much they were taken for granted. Follow that with the nomination of McCain - the least conservative candidate, in part thanks to open primaries and a very weak slate of choices, and what happened should be no surprise.
The task for the Conservatives is to finish the job, do what they can to purge the last of the RINOs and blue bloods, re-focus on getting government out of people’s lives and standing up for individual liberty and individual responsibility. Given the early indications that the government is about to take a huge left-hand lurch, possibly with Stalinist overtones, this should hopefully come naturally.
Unless they govern different than how they have been talking, the Democrats run a very real risk of crashing the smoking wreck that is the current US economy. Given the rhetoric of the past few weeks, one can assume that they genuinely lack an appreciation on just how hollow the engine of wealth is today thanks first to run-away speculation and later due to distortions caused by a ill-advised government bail-out.
Webster is right, they have a year or so to blame it all on Bush, but it’s all up to them now.
Final thoughts on the election
I have great faith in the robustness of our system of government and in the Constitution itself. While I would rather see McCain/Palin win, I’m not going to panic or otherwise go off the deep end if Obama/Biden wins. However, if there’s an Electoral College tie and Nancy Pelosi ends up in the White House, I may reconsider.
The best part if Obama wins: shutting up all those sanctimonious idiots over in Europe (and, frankly, throughout most of the rest of the world) who accuse the US of entrenched racism. Similarly, the downside of McCain winning is listening to all those sanctimonious idiots yammer for many years to come. In the meantime, wake me when you find a European (Russian, Asian, etc.) prime minister or president who is of African descent.
Beyond that, I’m a firm believer in the “syrup of Ipecac” theory of U.S. elected politics, viz., when a given party or administration goes too far off course, the people vomit and elect someone different. I think that’s what happened to the Democrats in 1968, to the Republicans in 1976, to the Democrats in 1980, to the Republicans in 1992, to the Democrats in 1994 and then in 2000, and to the Republicans in 2006. If Obama wins, and he and Congress really swing hard left, I believe we will see a repeat of the Clinton years, with a major Republican resurgence in 2010 and a close Presidential election in 2012. Hopefully the Republicans won’t nominate Bob Dole again (the John McCain of 1996 — really, go look at the similarities).
Regardless of who wins, I’m buying a “Palin in 2012″ t-shirt this week. I would say that the media smear of Palin has been unprecedented, but it’s not that different to what they did to Reagan back in 1976. And even in 1980, I still thought that Reagan was too partisan and unqualified to be President (I wrote in Sam Nunn when I voted, since I also thought that Jimmy Carter was a disaster). I was wrong. ..bruce w..