Some of the basic objectionable features of liberalism include a profound contempt for the past combined with an overwheening sense of personal superiority. Barack Obama excels at embodying liberalism.
His energy policy speech, delivered on Thursday at Prince George Community College, was a truly classic performance, featuring an utterly empty and fraudulent claim to eminence based upon superior learning and understanding embodied in a series of totally erroneous self-flattering comparisons.
Barack Obama demonstrated, once and for all, that he is an historically-illiterate imbecile, too ignorant, vainglorious, and incompetent to factcheck supposed historical claims, which really constituted a series of excellent examples of “things every badly educated idiot know to be true,” all of which were dead wrong.
Mark Steyn did a fine job of kicking Barack Obama’s boneheaded and abysmally ignorant butt around the block for this one, not failing to remind his readers of the time liberal presidential historian Michael Beschloss (Andover, Williams, Harvard) shared his opinion with the savant Don Imus that Barack Obama “is a guy whose IQ is off the charts” and “probably the smartest guy ever to become president.” The gods of history fell over laughing.
As John Hinderaker reports “the smartest guy ever to become president”‘s public pratfall was not without consequences. A new Internet meme of captioned portraits of Rutherford B. Hayes, avenging himself for Barack Obozo’s inaccurate slights, has taken off and become a craze.
You can see page after page of examples via this QuickMeme link.
Almost as many countries arrogate the honour of having been the natal soil of St. Patrick, as made a similar claim with respect to Homer. Scotland, England, France, and Wales, each furnish their respective pretensions: but, whatever doubts may obscure his birthplace, all agree in stating that, as his name implies, he was of a patrician family. He was born about the year 372, and when only sixteen years of age, was carried off by pirates, who sold him into slavery in Ireland; where his master employed him as a swineherd on the well-known mountain of Sleamish, in the county of Antrim. Here he passed seven years, during which time he acquired a knowledge of the Irish language, and made himself acquainted with the manners, habits, and customs of the people. Escaping from captivity, and, after many adventures, reaching the Continent, he was successively ordained deacon, priest, and bishop: and then once more, with the authority of Pope Celestine, he returned to Ireland to preach the Gospel to its then heathen inhabitants.
The principal enemies that St. Patrick found to the introduction of Christianity into Ireland, were the Druidical priests of the more ancient faith, who, as might naturally be supposed, were exceedingly adverse to any innovation. These Druids, being great magicians, would have been formidable antagonists to any one of less miraculous and saintly powers than Patrick. Their obstinate antagonism was so great, that, in spite of his benevolent disposition, he was compelled to curse their fertile lands, so that they became dreary bogs: to curse their rivers, so that they produced no fish: to curse their very kettles, so that with no amount of fire and patience could they ever be made to boil; and, as a last resort, to curse the Druids themselves, so that the earth opened and swallowed them up. …
The greatest of St. Patrick’s miracles was that of driving the venomous reptiles out of Ireland, and rendering the Irish soil, for ever after, so obnoxious to the serpent race, that they instantaneously die on touching it. Colgan seriously relates that St. Patrick accomplished this feat by beating a drum, which he struck with such fervour that he knocked a hole in it, thereby endangering the success of the miracle. But an angel appearing mended the drum: and the patched instrument was long exhibited as a holy relic. …
When baptizing an Irish chieftain, the venerable saint leaned heavily on his crozier, the steel-spiked point of which he had unwittingly placed on the great toe of the converted heathen. The pious chief, in his ignorance of Christian rites, believing this to be an essential part of the ceremony, bore the pain without flinching or murmur; though the blood flowed so freely from the wound, that the Irish named the place St. fhuil (stream of blood), now pronounced Struill, the name of a well-known place near Downpatrick. And here we are reminded of a very remarkable fact in connection with geographical appellations, that the footsteps of St. Patrick can be traced, almost from his cradle to his grave, by the names of places called after him.
Thus, assuming his Scottish origin, he was born at Kilpatrick (the cell or church of Patrick), in Dumbartonshire. He resided for some time at Dalpatrick (the district or division of Patrick), in Lanarkshire; and visited Crag-phadrig (the rock of Patrick), near Inverness. He founded two churches, Kirkpatrick at Irongray, in Kireudbright; and Kirkpatrick at Fleming, in Dumfries: and ultimately sailed from Portpatrick, leaving behind him such an odour of sanctity, that among the most distinguished families of the Scottish aristocracy, Patrick has been a favourite name down to the present day.
Arriving in England, he preached in Patterdale (Patrick’s dale), in Westmoreland: and founded the church of Kirkpatrick, in Durham. Visiting Wales, he walked over Sarn-badrig (Patrick’s causeway), which, now covered by the sea, forms a dangerous shoal in Carnarvon Bay: and departing for the Continent, sailed from Llan-badrig (the church of Patrick), in the island of Anglesea. Undertaking his mission to convert the Irish, he first landed at Innis-patrick (the island of Patrick), and next at Holmpatrick, on the opposite shore of the mainland, in the county of Dublin. Sailing northwards, he touched at the Isle of Man, sometimes since, also, called. Innis-patrick, where he founded another church of Kirkpatrick, near the town of Peel. Again landing on the coast of Ireland, in the county of Down, he converted and baptized the chieftain Dichu, on his own threshing-floor. The name of the parish of Saul, derived from Sabbal-patrick (the barn of Patrick), perpetuates the event. He then proceeded to Temple-patrick, in Antrim, and from thence to a lofty mountain in Mayo, ever since called Croagh-patrick.
He founded an abbey in East Meath, called Domnach-Padraig (the house of Patrick), and built a church in Dublin on the spot where St. Patrick’s Cathedral now stands. In an island of Lough Deng, in the county of Donegal, there is St. Patrick’s Purgatory: in Leinster, St. Patrick’s Wood; at Cashel, St. Patrick’s Rock; the St. Patrick’s Wells, at which the holy man is said to have quenched his thirst, may be counted by dozens. He is commonly stated to have died at Saul on the 17th of March 493, in the one hundred and twenty-first year of his age.
Poteen, a favourite beverage in Ireland, is also said to have derived its name from St. Patrick: he, according to legend, being the first who instructed the Irish in the art of distillation. This, however, is, to say the least, doubtful: the most authentic historians representing the saint as a very strict promoter of temperance, if not exactly a teetotaller. We read that in 445 he commanded his disciples to abstain from drink in the day-time, until the bell rang for vespers in the evening. One Colman, though busily engaged in the severe labours of the field, exhausted with heat, fatigue, and intolerable thirst, obeyed so literally the injunction of his revered preceptor, that he refrained from indulging himself with one drop of water during a long sultry harvest day. But human endurance has its limits: when the vesper bell at last rang for evensong, Colman dropped down dead—a martyr to thirst. Irishmen can well appreciate such a martyrdom; and the name of Colman, to this day, is frequently cited, with the added epithet of Shadhack—the Thirsty.
‘In Burgo Duno, tumulo tumulantur in uno,
Brigida, Patricius, atque Columba pins.’
Which may be thus rendered:
‘In the hill of Down, buried in one tomb,
Were Bridget and Patricius, with Columba the pious.’
The shamrock, or small white clover (trifolium repens of botanists), is almost universally worn in the hat over all Ireland, on St. Patrick’s day. The popular notion is, that when St. Patrick was preaching the doctrine of the Trinity to the pagan Irish, he used this plant, bearing three leaves upon one stem, as a symbol or illustration of the great mystery. To suppose, as some absurdly hold, that he used it as an argument, would be derogatory to the saint’s high reputation for orthodoxy and good sense: but it is certainly a curious coincidence, if nothing more, that the trefoil in Arabic is called skamrakh, and was held sacred in Iran as emblematical of the Persian Triads. Pliny, too, in his Natural History, says that serpents are never seen upon trefoil, and it prevails against the stings of snakes and scorpions. This, considering St. Patrick’s connexion with snakes, is really remarkable, and we may reasonably imagine that, previous to his arrival, the Irish had ascribed mystical virtues to the trefoil or shamrock, and on hearing of the Trinity for the first time, they fancied some peculiar fitness in their already sacred plant to shadow forth the newly revealed and mysterious doctrine. …
In the Galtee or Gaultie Mountains, situated between the counties of Cork and Tipperary, there are seven lakes, in one of which, called Lough Dilveen, it is said Saint Patrick, when banishing the snakes and toads from Ireland, chained a monster serpent, telling him to remain there till Monday.
The serpent every Monday morning calls out in Irish, ‘It is a long Monday, Patrick.’
That St Patrick chained the serpent in Lough Dilveen, and that the serpent calls out to him every Monday morning, is firmly believed by the lower orders who live in the neighbourhood of the Lough.
Those of us who frequent the North Woods in pursuit of Atlantic salmon are only too familiar with these insatiable and numberless horrors. They are at their worst in Labrador on the North Shore of the St. Lawrence. You can find a version there as large as your thumbnail.
Donald Sensing observes that the great paid-for-contraceptives brouhaha is intended by democrats to persuade silly women to vote on the basis of group politics.
In the Democrat mind, sex without sex’s consequences are the only thing that women should think about when they approach a voting booth. Finney and Thompson, et. al., actually think that unless the government makes sure that women’s sex lives are unencumbered, then a woman simply cannot manage her job, housing or children. Sex rules all else.
The Democrat party truly cannot comprehend a woman going to vote who is more concerned about the dent in her paycheck caused by $5-per-gallon gasoline than finding free condoms, or who worries about the future impoverishment of her children and grandchildren because of Obama’s borrow and spend binges more than she worries about buying the Pill, or whose most pressing concern is not sexual liberty, but a college-graduate son or daughter who has moved back to live with mom because s/he can’t find a job and therefore can’t make student loan payments and rent at the same time.
Not in the Dems’ world view is a woman who pays her mortgage every month but who know that her home’s market value is less than the mortgage principal remaining, and stupidly thinks that this is more important to her future (and thus her voting) than getting morning-after pills. There is no room in Democrat gender-identity politics for a woman who has been married to one man for 35 years and so never thinks about getting free contraceptives or an abortion (that is, what Dems say is “basic health care”) but who is intensely concerned with her elderly parents’ net worth falling as inflation rises.
No, these women simply do not authentically exist in the Democrat universe. Such women simply have not heard the full message that there should be nothing more important to a woman than sex, sex, sex.
To the Democrat party, women are simply sex objects, though with political and statist rather than fleshly purposes. But objects is all they are. That’s the real message that countless women get very well and strongly reject.
First they came for your morphine and cocaine. You don’t remember that because they banned those over a hundred years ago. Then they came for alcohol, but they were forced to give it back. They outlawed marijuana, “the killer weed” which produced “reefer madness” allegedly turning its smokers into violent maniacs just a bit before my generation came along. Then, they went after tobacco. Try lighting a cigarette today in public buildings anywhere in an American city.
Has anybody stopped to wonder what’s next on Puritanism’s hit list? Kelly Freston can tell you.
When I think about the effect of animal products on human health, I’m reminded of how quickly we’ve done a national about face on tobacco, and I look forward to the day when the Times magazine has a similar apology from someone who promoted animal products — because the evidence is in and it continues to grow: Animal products kill a lot more Americans than tobacco does.
The West’s three biggest killers — heart disease, cancer, and stroke — are linked to excessive animal product consumption, and vegetarians have much lower risks of all three. Vegetarians also have a fraction of the obesity and diabetes rates of the general population — of course, both diseases are at epidemic levels and are only getting worse.
But much more important than the vegetarian community’s general statistics are what can be done with the right vegetarian diet: For some years now, doctors have been not just preventing, but even reversing, heart disease using a low-fat vegetarian diet.
That’s right — the disease that kills almost as many Americans as everything else combined can be not just prevented, but reversed, with a low fat plant-based diet, as documented by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn in Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease
.
They’ve evidently converted that confirmed sensualist Bill Clinton. His video impressed me actually. He has lost a lot of weight, and it isn’t difficult to believe that a vegan diet would return most of us to our weight levels in high school (if not in Auschwitz). Trying that diet to lose weight does make a certain amount of sense, and losing weight is undoubtedly good for reducing the progression of heart disease. I’m not sure that I believe that eating like a vegan idiot will actually reverse heart disease though. I did buy Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn’s book and may give that diet a bit of a try.
This liberal bumper sticker expresses typical community of fashion attitudes.
Scott Locklin explains to democrats why working class Americans vote Republican “against their economic interest.”
Your average member of the lunchpailetariat is acutely aware that those who are presently in charge of the Democratic Party hate him. Rednecks are villainized in the media, in academia, and in the private lives of folks who think they know better because of their sociology class. Many of the problems minorities experience in American society are laid at the feet of working-class white people. The irony is that these pallid scapegoats are politically powerless, unlike the latte tribe that demonizes them. Hating rednecks is the anti-Semitism of Democratic asses.
On the rare occasion when Democrats attempt to communicate with their white Neanderthal brethren, it is broadcast on a carrier wave of pure condescension. The left has a sort of collective Tourette syndrome involving frequent mention of sexism, racism, and gay rights. These subjects are meaningless to hourly laborers who lack the leisure time to nurse nihilistic resentments against Western Civilization.
The corporate oligarchs and neocon goons who control the Republican Party obviously have financial and political interests which are not aligned with those of the white working classes. But they also do not demonize or condescend to peckerwoods who drive pickups and go fishing. It isn’t that Republican ideas are great for the lunchpailetariat or anyone else, but their lack of seething hostility makes them preferable to Democrats.
Lefties should only be confused about the white proles who still vote for them. The left’s “Why don’t you loooove me anymore?†routine with the white working class reminds me of a friend’s crazy-ex-girlfriend story. She cheated on him, lit his car on fire, and gave him the clap. She used to get drunk and scream into his answering machine at 4AM. Then she wondered why he never called back.
Greg Smith‘s resignation from Goldman Sachs via a denunciatory letter to the New York Times editorial page yesterday provoked Jim Geraughty (via his emailed Morning Jolt) to imagine the same letter composed by a fed-up Dark Lord of the Sith.
Today is my last day at the Empire.
After almost twenty years, first as a summer intern, then as the Emperor’s spy on the Jedi Council, then as his apprentice and Dark Lord of the Sith, I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of the Empire’s culture, its people (both cloned and non-cloned) and its role in bringing order to the galaxy. I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it, and I don’t mean destructive in its traditional, positive connotation.
This used to be an institution based upon facing one’s foes eye-to-eye, like a room full of younglings. Or betraying longtime brothers-in-arms in the middle of battle, when they least expect it. But instead, management meetings are dominated by the boasting and taunting of Imperial officers whose lack of faith is disturbing, all too proud of the technological terrors they’ve constructed. They fail to see that the power to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.
I have attempted to reach out and make a gripping argument to those who disagree, but the old, all-too-complacent top management insists these whippersnappers be released and that this assessment is dismissed as “pointless bickering.” Time and again, middle management proves itself as clumsy as it is stupid. Outside consultants are dismissed with a sneer, “we don’t need their kind.” Managers expect us to ignore delays in construction projects by sniveling that our presence is an “unexpected pleasure” and how honored they are by our presence. We can dispense with the pleasantries.
People who care only about making the same super-weapon, again and again, with more or less the exact same weakness and design flaw, will not sustain this Empire — or the fear of its people — for very much longer.
When I was in high school, I had Latin in 9th and 10th grade. Our Latin teacher had a curious personal custom. He sacrificed annually, in honor of Great Caesar, on the Ides of March, the male student in each class who had offended him by doing the least work and/or being the most disruptive influence. He sacrificed additionally one female student from each class whose selection, I fear, was based only upon his own capricious whim and covert sexual attraction.
The sacrifice consisted of the victim being bent over a desk and receiving three strokes of a paddle, delivered by a six foot, 250 lb+. Latin teacher laying on the strokes with a will and putting his weight behind them. (I won’t name him.) Mr. X’s paddle was a four foot long piece of 1 1/2″ thick pine, produced in our high school’s wood shop by General Curriculum students, who did not take Latin, but admired Mr. X. The paddle was roughly in the form of a Roman gladius, and its surface was scored by a series of regular lines, because it was generally believed that a blow from an uneven surface was more painful.
Mr. X had a fixed policy of assigning the duty of construing the day’s Latin assignment on the blackboard in strict and completely predictable order, going up and down the aisles of desks. Two or three of the smart kids would always actually do the Latin, and it was our recognized duty to supply the translations in advance to the person who would be going to the blackboard.
Readiness to translate correctly was really vital, because Mr. X would apply his dreaded paddle to anyone who failed to write out the day’s assignment correctly on the blackboard. It was rare, but every once in a while some truly feckless idiot would neglect to seek out Kenny Hollenbach, Jack Rigrotsky, or yours truly, and would arrive at the blackboard, chalk in hand, unprepared.
Mr. X typically broke the current paddle over the defaulter’s posterior, and the mental defectives in shop class would gleefully commence the fabrication of a new, yet more elaborate, edition of the famous paddle.
Every March 15th, two 9th and 10th grade Academic Curriculum sections would look on with the same sadistic interest of Roman spectators at the gladitorial games, as Mr. X conducted his sacrifices. I can recall that he struck the pretty strawberry blonde with the well-developed embonpoint so hard that he raised dust from her skirt. We were a bit puzzled that girls actually submitted to being beaten with a paddle for no reason, but all this went on undoubtedly because the legend of Mr. X the fierce disciplinarian had enormous appeal in our local community. The whole thing was fascinating, and it all made such a good story that everyone, student and adult, in their heart of hearts, enthusiastically approved.
Mr. X would never be allowed to get away with that kind of thing today, alas! In Hades, poor Caesar must do without his sacrifice. And it is my impression that Latin instruction has rather overwhelmingly also become a thing of the past. Kids today learn Spanish. Modern languages are easier and thought more relevant.
Tim de Lisle would not approve. He recently argued that Latin the best language.
If you work with words, Latin is the Pilates session that stays with you for life: it strengthens the core. It teaches you grammar and syntax, better than your own language, whose structure you will have absorbed before you are capable of noticing it. Latin offers no hiding place, no refuge for the woolly. Each piece of the sentence has to slot in with the rest; every ending has to be the right one. To learn Latin is to learn rigour.
The price for the rigour is the mortis. Soon enough, someone will helpfully inform you that Latin is a dead language. In one way, sure, but in others it lives on. It is a vivid presence in English and French, it is the mother of Italian and Spanish, and it even seeps into German. More often than not, the words these languages have in common are the Latin ones: it remains a lingua franca. The words we take from Latin tend to be long, reflective, intellectual (the short, punchy words we didn’t need to import: live, die, eat, drink, love, hate). Business and academia, two worlds with little else in common, both rely more and more on long Latinate words. The European Union speaks little else. Ten years ago, for another article, I had to read the proposed European constitution. It was a long turgid parade of Latin-derived words. The burghers of Brussels were trying to build a superstate out of abstract nouns.
Management-speak and Euro-blather are Latin at its worst, but learning it will still help you cut through them to find clarity. It is a little harder to bullshit when you’ve learnt Latin (though quite possible to bluster, as Boris Johnson proves). And if you stick at it you discover, after no more than eight or nine years, that this is a glorious language per se.
Its literature has stood the test of millennia: Ovid is diverting, Lucretius is stimulating, Cicero is riveting. Horace can be a drag—like a bad weekend columnist, always wittering on about his garden and his cellar, except when coming out with quotable drivel about how sweet it is to die in battle. But his contemporary Virgil is majestic. He set himself the most daunting task—giving Rome its own “Iliad†and “Odysseyâ€, in a single epic, while staying on the right side of an emperor—and pulled it off. I did French and Greek too for years, and enjoyed them, but nothing quite matched up to the pleasure of reading the “Aeneid†in the original.
I think Mr. de Lisle is quite right about the benefits to one’s writing skills of the study of the classical languages in one’s youth, though personally I do not admire (or have good) Latin at all. I had two years of high school Latin, and I still have great difficulty in figuring out who is doing what to whom in the typical Latin sentence. I much prefer Greek, and I would far rather read The Iliad in the original than The Aeneid.
Carlos Gussenhoven, a phonologist — a linguist who studies the sounds used in different languages — at Radboud University in the Netherlands, believes the challenge lies in squirrel’s syllable structure.
Linguists break words into clusters — groups of consonants that have no intervening vowels. In German, “-rl” is an end cluster, Gussenhoven explained. It comes at the end of a syllable, as in the common German name Karl, rather than forming a syllable of its own. Thus German speakers try to translate the two-syllable English word “squirrel” into the monosyllabic German sound “skwörl ” in the same way that “squirm” becomes “skwörm.”
But that doesn’t sound quite right, and Germans know it. “Dissatisfied with this result, the German speaker tries to produce a real ‘R,’ of the sort you get in (Rock ‘n) Roll, in the end cluster, wreaking havoc,” Gussenhoven [said].
This Hopper-esque painting of houses in Manayunk, a neighborhood in the northwest section of Philadelphia, viewed from the Cynwyd Trail by Nancy Herman reminded me very powerfully of the view of house roofs I saw looking out the attic window of my boyhood home in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. I was startled and a bit moved by nostalgia. It seems that densely built, working class Pennsylvania neighborhoods have a pretty strong degree of architectural similarity.
The artist writes:
This is the last painting from the Cynwyd Trail for now. I know I will be returning to these close-ups of Manayunk from the trail sooner or later as I love the shapes created by the roof tops. While I am painting them I imagine living in these houses, which adds to the fun. Everything looks so cheery on this sunny afternoon but what is it really like to live there?
She actually sells these for only $125. If that one weren’t already sold, I’d have liked to have acquired it.
Hat tip to Vanderleun. How did he find it, I wonder?
Run Google image searches on: “Penile Fracture” and “Peyronie’s disease.” I’m not posting pictures.
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Jeff Winkler had a rather unusual, and incredibly unpleasant to even contemplate, accident.
With my one kidney, the Meckel’s diverticulum was unable to dissipate a blood clot causing aortic arrhythmia, which led to the ruptured penile corpus fracture and Peyronie’s disease. It was a freak accident.
