Archive for January, 2013
13 Jan 2013

David Brooks To Teach Humility at Yale

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Who could possibly be better qualified than the New York Times’ resident token conservative to teach a college course on Humility? Presumably Mr. Brooks is working on a follow-up seminar for next Fall on Sycophancy and Grovelling.

What I found odd was the “GLBL 345 01” Course Number. I had to look it up, learning for my trouble that GLBL means that the course is being offered in the (ahem!) Yale Department of Global Affairs.

We didn’t have such a department in my day. Back then, aspiring diplomats studied French and took courses on diplomatic history in the History Department.

The Brooks Humility course seems oddly located. It appears to me to constitute a series of discussions of literary expressions of human finitude and immorality. If I’m understanding its topic correctly, I would think the course ought to belong under the English Department.

Specific disciplinary taxonomy, I suppose, scarcely matters today in a world in which essentially any topic which a clever chap can organize into a number of amusing hour and fifty minute talks can be a college course representing a one-tenth part of $50,000-60,000 worth of higher education.

13 Jan 2013

Eloquent Rabbit Tracks

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photo: taken in Bethel, Alaska by Susan Barstow.

13 Jan 2013

“Citizens, Turn in Weapons!”

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(Soviet poster via Ol’ Remus)

And we all know how well that worked out for them.

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90-odd years after the appearance of the above poster, we find Stanislav Mishin (in Pravda, these days a much better paper than the New York Times, urging Americans to “never give up your guns.”

[A]t one point, Russia was one of the most heavily armed societies on earth. This was, of course, when we were free under the Tsar. Weapons, from swords and spears to pistols, rifles and shotguns were everywhere, common items. People carried them concealed, they carried them holstered. Fighting knives were a prominent part of many traditional attires and those little tubes criss crossing on the costumes of Cossacks and various Caucasian peoples? Well those are bullet holders for rifles.

Various armies, such as the Poles, during the Смута (Times of Troubles), or Napoleon, or the Germans even as the Tsarist state collapsed under the weight of WW1 and Wall Street monies, found that holding Russian lands was much much harder than taking them and taking was no easy walk in the park but a blood bath all its own. In holding, one faced an extremely well armed and aggressive population Hell bent on exterminating or driving out the aggressor.

This well armed population was what allowed the various White factions to rise up, no matter how disorganized politically and militarily they were in 1918 and wage a savage civil war against the Reds. It should be noted that many of these armies were armed peasants, villagers, farmers and merchants, protecting their own. If it had not been for Washington’s clandestine support of and for the Reds, history would have gone quite differently.

Moscow fell, for example, not from a lack of weapons to defend it, but from the lying guile of the Reds. Ten thousand Reds took Moscow and were opposed only by some few hundreds of officer cadets and their instructors. Even then the battle was fierce and losses high. However, in the city alone, at that time, lived over 30,000 military officers (both active and retired), all with their own issued weapons and ammunition, plus tens of thousands of other citizens who were armed. The Soviets promised to leave them all alone if they did not intervene. They did not and for that were asked afterwards to come register themselves and their weapons: where they were promptly shot.

Of course being savages, murderers and liars does not mean being stupid and the Reds learned from their Civil War experience. One of the first things they did was to disarm the population. From that point, mass repression, mass arrests, mass deportations, mass murder, mass starvation were all a safe game for the powers that were. The worst they had to fear was a pitchfork in the guts or a knife in the back or the occasional hunting rifle. Not much for soldiers.

13 Jan 2013

Americans’ Position on Gun Control Hardening Recently

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One sees these days the cryptic motto “Molon Labe” appearing everywhere.

“Molon Labe” is a Greek quotation. According to Plutarch, the Persian King Xerxes demanded that the 300 Spartans holding the pass at Thermopylae in the face of his enormous army should surrender their weapons.

Xerxes writing to him again thus, Send me thy arms, he returned, Come and take them. [Greek: Molon labe]

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The words ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ are inscribed on the marble Leonidas Monument at Thermopylae.

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Barack Obama, when he’s thinking about issuing an executive order as a constitutional end run and ordering federal authorities to confiscate arms in the hands of American citizens, ought to pause and recall that the United States came to exist specifically because British General Thomas Gage received orders from William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, the King’s Secretary of State ordering him to disarm the citizens of Middlesex County in Massachusetts. General Gage consequently on the 19th of April in 1775 dispatched 700 infantry in the direction of the towns of Lexington and Concord. Resistance occurred and continued until October 19, 1781 when General Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown. It is by no means impossible that a grand, new federal Gun Control initiative, enacted with the same energy and indifference to public opposition as Obamacare, would encounter real and organized resistance.

13 Jan 2013

A Plea to George R. R. Martin: “Winter is Coming!”

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

11 Jan 2013

California Watch Dog

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Mr. Teeth

A five-foot caiman (presumably an example of Melanosuchus niger was found by Alamada County police guarding a marijuana cache in a private home in the Castro Valley.

Independent

11 Jan 2013

Darth Seder

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Another religious sect celebrates its high holy day.

11 Jan 2013

Recruiting Ad From Georgia (the Country, not the State)

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What boy wouldn’t want to pick up that saber and defend his country against the Muscovites? I wish they had captioned the motto on the sword. I would like to have translated it.

10 Jan 2013

Anti-Gay God Removed From Inaugural Program

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YAHWEH

Just as Louis Giglio, previously scheduled to perform the benediction at President Obama’s second inauguration, has been removed from the program as the result of previous anti-gay comments, the Obama Administration announced today that the well-known Semitic mountain deity, YAHWEH aka Jehovah aka Allah, will be voluntarily withdrawing as the object of prayers and invocations during the event.

YAHWEH is on the record as authoring the Old Testament book of Leviticus containing an explicit prohibition against “lying with mankind as with womankind.” He additionally reported first-hand, in his Book of Genesis and in the al-Koran (which he allegedly dictated to Mohammed), that he personally destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, a pair of “cities on the plain” near the Jordan River as a personal expression of His intolerance of homosexuality.

The Thracian Dionysius, famous for his personal androgyny will be stepping in as object of prayers and requests for benedictions. He is additionally reported in an account expected soon to appear in Gawker to have volunteered personally to take responsibility for the catering and to be in charge of arranging the Inaugural celebrations’ evening entertainment.


Dionysius

10 Jan 2013

The Uses of Being Hip

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Victor Davis Hanson takes on America’s most influential (and intellectually fraudulent) subculture, hinting (with some natural bitterness) that Mitt Romney could have carried America’s fashionable urban enclaves [if he had] “only reminded us of his family’s Mexican ancestry and ran as Zarpa Romneo, and against Barry Dunham.”

America has always been a country of self-invention. Yet there used to be some correlation between the life that one lived and the life that one professed. It was hard to be a phony in the grimy reality of the coal mine, the steel mill, the south 40 acres, or atop a girder over Manhattan.

No longer in our post-modern, post-industrial, metrosexual fantasyland. The nexus of big government, big money, and globalization has created a new creed of squaring the circle of being both liberal and yet elitist, egalitarian-talking but rich-acting, talking like a 99 percenter and living like a 1 percenter. And the rub is not that the two poles are contradictory, but that they are, in fact, necessary for each other: talking about the people means it is OK to live unlike the people.

In short, we can all be just what we profess to be. The key in our world of blue-jeaned billionaires is being hip — or rather at least professing to be hip.

Read the whole thing.

10 Jan 2013

Matt Drudge Causes MSM To Have a Cow

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Glenn Reynolds yesterday actually included a rare image capture in his posted link as a deliberate tribute to Matt Drudge’s eloquent talent for juxtaposition.

Leftie Establishment journalists, naturellement, reacted like irate monkeys on exhibit at the zoo, flinging epithets, ridicule, and abuse in Drudge’s direction.

09 Jan 2013

Tweet of the Day

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