The world’s oldest European eel just died in its home, a well in a southern Swedish fishing town, aged 155. …
In 1859 an 8-year-old Swede by the name of Samuel Nilsson threw the eel into the well. While the act may be reminiscent of children throwing strange objects into toilets in modern times, it was in fact common practice to throw an eel in your well.
Many towns didn’t have public water systems until the 1960s, and eels ate the flies and other creepy crawlies, keeping the house’s water supply clean .
Since its drop into the dark in 1859, the eel has been featured in books and documentaries, and made multiple cameos on Swedish TV.
Alan Caruba thinks –as do I– the more vacationing Obama does, the better.
When the President spent three of a recent week’s five working days fund raising for the Democratic Party people, even the press took notice. On August 9 he began a two-week vacation in a Martha’s Vineyard mansion and I’d like to suggest that he just stay on vacation for the remainder of his second term.
I grant you that his vacations do tend to be a tad costly. Last year the Obama family took vacations to Africa in June and July, and spent Christmas in Honolulu. According to Air Force documents, the two trips racked up nearly $16 million in expenses. If the President would just pick someplace to stay and not be getting on and off Air Force One to fund-raise it could be considered a savings. …
My thought is that, as long as Obama is on vacation things cannot get much worse here at home, short of a foreign invasion. …
My feeling that he should just stay on vacation for the next two years is based on what he’s done to us over the past six. Indeed, our grandchildren will be able to name the 44th President given the fact that they will be paying off the debt he has created since 2009; $17 trillion and growing.
Then, of course, there’s Obamacare which a Democrat-controlled House and Senate passed without a single Republican vote. And we all know how partisan the GOP is, right?
On the other hand, millions of people who had perfectly good healthcare insurance plans lost them and the problems plaguing Obamacare have run from its website to the path White House lawyers are making as they visit the Supreme Court every other week trying to justify its various provisions. If the President stays on vacation maybe people will forget that he told them, “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it.â€
If he stays on vacation, maybe people will forget the billions wasted on Green energy projects, wind and solar, involving companies that went bankrupt so fast it was hard to keep up with them. The solar farms that exist roast birds in mid-flight and the wind farms decapitate them, including eagles that are a protected species everywhere other than near a wind turbine.
Obama is not a big fan of affordable energy. He gave the finger to Canada on the Keystone XL pipeline which would have not cost taxpayers a dime and generated jobs, plus revenue. He has openly waged war against coal used to produce electricity even though the U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal. At least he hasn’t come out against fracking that has helped produce a boom in natural gas.
One thing Obama would not have to think about while on vacation are the millions of Americans who are still out of work. Unless, of course, he doesn’t think about them anyway. Unless, of course, he only thinks of them in terms of how to get them enrolled in some Big Government giveaway program. The problem with that is that he’s giving away the money taken from people who do have jobs.
My concern is that, on an extended vacation, he might begin to obsess about “climate changeâ€, but then I realized that, for him, that only applies if his golf game gets rained out.
Who could take over while he’s on the links? Certainly not Joe Biden. Or John Kerry. Maybe George W. Bush would lend a hand?
So think about it, Mr. President. You’re taking off two weeks in August. Why not make it two years?
Jessica Valenti argues, in the Guardian, that the world owes her some tampons.
For too many girls, the products that mark “becoming a woman†are luxuries, not givens. And for young women worldwide, getting your period means new expenses, days away from school and risking regular infections. All because too many governments don’t recognize feminine hygiene as a health issue.
We need to move beyond the stigma of “that time of the month†– women’s feminine hygiene products should be free for all, all the time.
Sanitary products are vital for the health, well-being and full participation of women and girls across the globe. The United Nations and Human Rights Watch, for example, have both linked menstrual hygiene to human rights. Earlier this year, Jyoti Sanghera, chief of the UN Human Rights Office on Economic and Social Issues, called the stigma around menstrual hygiene “a violation of several human rights, most importantly the right to human dignityâ€. …
But this is less an issue of costliness than it is of principle: menstrual care is health care, and should be treated as such. But much in the same way insurance coverage or subsidies for birth control are mocked or met with outrage, the idea of women even getting small tax breaks for menstrual products provokes incredulousness because some people lack an incredible amount of empathy … and because it has something to do with vaginas. Affordable access to sanitary products is rarely talked about outside of NGOs – and when it is, it’s with shame or derision.
In 1986, Gloria Steinem wrote that if men got periods, they “would brag about how long and how muchâ€: that boys would talk about their menstruation as the beginning of their manhood, that there would be “gifts, religious ceremonies†and sanitary supplies would be “federally funded and freeâ€. I could live without the menstrual bragging – though mine is particularly impressive – and ceremonial parties, but seriously: Why aren’t tampons free?
Quote the artist: “When Richard Nixon first traveled through time there was a considerable malfunction with his time machine, he was transported back to the ice age where he ended up battling a sabertooth tiger.”
You find strange and wonderful things on the Internet, even things which boggle the mind. Yesterday, I was doing a Google Image Search and, in the normal manner of things, a number of images having nothing recognizably in common with what I had searched for turned up. One usually just skims past those kinds of images, instantly dismissing them from mind, but this image made me stop and do a double-take.
I began to hear Neil Young singing: “Smilodon tabbies and Nixon coming…”
The artist, a fellow named SharpWriter, seems to have done quite a lot of US presidents and some historical figures as fantasy superheroes. Check out Bill Clinton. I think this artist has ascended past the realm of kitsch to the space of laughing-with-appreciation.
Edward Luttwak, in a very learned essay on “The Cycles—or Stages—of Chinese History,” published by the Hoover Institution, describes the Chinese version of “Balance of Power” theory.
The innermost circle of the Tianxia is formed by the rest of the Politburo and top Beijing officialdom, while its outermost circle comprises the Solomon Islands along with the twenty or so other utterly benighted “outer barbarian†countries that still do not recognize Beijing, preferring Taipei. In between, all other Chinese from officials and tycoons to ordinary subjects and overseas Chinese fit in their own circles, further and further from the imperial coreas do foreign states both large and small, both near and far, both already respectful (too few) and those still arrogantly vainglorious. It is the long-range task of China’s external policy to bring each and every state into a proper relationship with the emperor—that is, a tributary relationship, in which they deliver goods and services if only as tokens of fealty, in exchange for security and prosperity, but even more for the privilege of proximity to the globally benevolent emperor1. All this is of course nothing more than an exceptionally elaborate rendition of universal ambitions that are merely grander for the greater—the Byzantine ranking of foreign potentates by their proximity to the emperor was only slightly less elaborate.
Nor is there anything peculiarly Chinese about the desire to bring other states into a tributary relationship—often better than a full incorporation, which may be unwanted for any number of reasons, and obviously superior to an alliance however close and secure but between equals, whereby there must be reciprocity, a quid for every quo, usually costly or irksome in some way. Hence from time immemorial, stronger clans, tribes, potentates, and entire nations have done their best to impose tributary relations on weaker clans, tribes, potentates and nations, obtaining goods and services for their forbearance and perhaps protection, or at least tokens of respectful subordination. Chinese emperors wanted no more than that, and unlike most recipients, not infrequently gave gifts more valuable than the tribute they received (as did many Byzantine emperors, by the way).
What is peculiar to China’s political culture, and of very great contemporary relevance is the centrality within it of a very specific doctrine on how to bring powerful foreigners—indeed foreigners initially more powerful than the empire—into a tributary relationship.
Be sure to read on in order to find out how it would be applied to us.
Nicholas James Pell, in Taki’s Magazine, deplores the radical Utopian Left’s desire to re-make predatory animals into vegetarians and remodel all of Nature into a “pan species welfare state.”
[O]ne of the curious things about leftist egalitarianism: it tends to eat everything in its path. The second you start believing that all men must be re-created equal, under penalty of law, the road to reasonable accommodations for people who think they’re elves or those who prefer to see multiple personality disorder as a lifestyle choice isn’t too long. And so we live in a world where grown men (or at least Ronan Farrow) get paid beaucoup bucks to go on television and bemoan the lack of ethnic diversity in cartoon smileys used by teenage girls for whom typing out whole words is too much of a bother.
Nor, when you accept the secular postmillennialist argument that humans need to wipe out every trace of injustice on Earth, is it that big of a leap to argue in favor of changing the genetic code of wild animals to make them stop eating meat—though it’s still not clear why the plan to eliminate suffering from the world doesn’t include anything about rescuing plants from consumption. Carnivorous animals, specifically lions, are singled out as “sociopathic killing machines.†David Pearce, the “independent philosopher†and transhumanist vegan who cooked up the Hedonistic Imperative, seems somewhat less interested in reprogramming carnivorous animals than he is in eliminating them.
To wit: “To judge that lions should exist is to affirm that it is better, in some sense, that sociopathic killing machines prowl the Earth rather than alternative herbivores.â€
I’m somewhat sympathetic to the argument that people who have never field dressed an animal don’t get to to grouse about animal welfare.
They say: “in a few months.” The features they describe sound very cool, but one suspects that like most academic publications they are going to charge all the tea in China. We are invited to inquire about access plans by email.
Scribner’s recently released “The Sun Also Rises: The Hemingway Library Edition”, an edition featuring bonus materials: two introductions by Hemingway family members; an essay on bull fighting in the ’20s; samples of early revisions; the discarded first chapters; possible titles considered by the author (such as RIVER TO THE SEA or TWO LIE TOGETHER); and some new photographs, including one of Hemingway’s ticket stub for the bull fights in Pamplona.
At the start, it seems, Hemingway was attempting to write a novel very different from what would become “The Sun Also Rises,†which made his name as one of “those ones with their clear restrained writing.†He imagined a book in which the “whole business†of life gets expressed, in all of its messy detours and associations. In the same draft chapter, Hemingway goes on: “Now when my friends read this they will say it is awful. It is not what they had hoped or expected from me. Gertrude Stein once told me that remarks are not literature. All right, let it go at that. Only this time all the remarks are going in and if it is not literature who claimed it was anyway.â€
This minor manifesto, embedded in a draft of his first novel, conceives of a book with greater intellectual and artistic ambitions than Hemingway ever produced—one akin to the more abstract fictions of the modernists. The line that he struck through—“It is not what they had hoped or expected from meâ€â€”becomes a potentially radical departure that Hemingway never realized, and that was nearly lost to history. Yet “The Sun Also Rises†is far from being a lesser thing, for all of its restrained clarity. It is partly a book of “literary signs,†perhaps against Hemingway’s own intentions. But it is also a book—Gertrude Stein be damned—of remarks, both in the elliptical declarations that the characters make to one another, and in the weighted silences that linger between them. “I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together.†That line, which belongs to the narrator, and to the author, was there from the beginning. It is an echo of Hemingway’s more eager and brash equivocations in the drafts, a claim that there was an unseen depth to his plainspoken prose. It is an author’s note, a statement of purpose—subtly and skillfully absorbed into the art of storytelling.
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Recently at HuffPo: 15 photos of Papa, with quotations. Amusingly, the version first published was loaded with spurious examples and had to be revised. Hemingway is laughing in Hell.
