Huh. We use ours almost daily, but our kitchen is too small to eat in it.
Category Archives: History
The Andes
An interesting read: How to build a mountain range. I’ve always wanted to see them.
[Via Austin Bay]
Joss Wheedon
He’s starting a new SF series on HBO. Could be good.
The “Good Populism”
The Left Doesn’t Fear The Gestapo
…because they’ve become the Gestapo.
They were always the Gestapo, in one form or another. The Nazis were leftists, just a more virulent form of them.
Agriculture
Was it a mistake?
No; it enabled modern civilization, but it did so at a cost to human health. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, it’s long.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, I got all the way through it. She doesn’t really address the health effects of a grain-based diet.
Happy Birthday, America!
It’s the 242nd anniversary of the signing of the Declaration, and 155th since the victory at Gettysburg and fall of Vicksburg, sealing the ultimate fate of the Confederacy. It’s also Calvin Coolidge’s birthday (1872) and he gave a very memorable speech on the subject in 1926.
Sadly, though, the same political party that lost that war, and particularly young people whom they’ve maleducated from kindergarten through college, seems to continue to hate America.
[Afternoon update]
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s a great quote from that Coolidge speech:
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
Yes. Collectivism is the oldest game in the book.
[Update a while later]
I just realized that he gave that speech on the sesquicentennial.
[Thursday noon update]
(Formerly Portuguese) Sara Hoyt: Conceived in liberty:
I’d worked. I’d worked at becoming an American.
Afterward came the INS crawling all over our papers and asking the strangest questions about things like the fact we had no children (despite much trying). They wanted to make sure we had a real marriage, see, not a sham to get citizenship. I’m all right with that.
Because it’s important to want to be an American. And it’s important to do it properly so you know you belong. It’s important to believe in the rights of others to their own liberty and their own property. You can be a citizen of this great country with no chicanery.
On that day I took the oath like I took my marriage vows. As words that change you inside. Afterward, we went out to lunch, then came home, and I went out to get the mail, and I felt that this was now my country — that I belonged. We all have a place in the world, and this is mine.
I’m an American. It’s an amazing thing to be, a part of a country that’s something new in the world.
You see, the natural way for humans to live is to be subjected to some tyrant, to the whims of some strong man. Some other countries, like England, have curbed (used to have curbed) the rights of those in power to mistreat them. But no country has devoted itself as fully to the cause of individual liberty as we have.
Sure, we squabble over what that means, and some of our elected officials are disgraces. Sure, we face a very difficult fight to continue existing. Yes, the socialists in the failed state to the South pose a danger, because we can’t afford Venezuela on our doorstep or the streaming hordes coming over the border to make us into copies of what they left behind. (And you thought Californians were bad.) Sure, many of our compatriots are that only in name and seem to want only to bring us low and destroy us.
What? You expected a cake walk?
We are something quite new in the world. You expected the old to accept us with applause?
Our very existence shames them and makes them feel their smallness. And of course they’ve convinced the weak-minded in our midst — many of them self-proclaimed intelligentsia — to fight on their side and against us.
No one said it would be easy. Liberty is always a generation from extinction. And that’s if we’re lucky.
This reminds me of Elon Musk’s saying that he wasn’t born in America, but he got here as soon as he could.
[Late afternoon update]
College grads feel less patriotic than non college grads. Great job, academia.
“Fixing” The System
No, Democrats, your election losses don’t indicate a broken system; they indicate a broken and morally bankrupt political party.
Who Should The Nominee Be?
A roundup from legal bloggers, with three votes for Don Willett, including one from Instapundit.
[Tuesday-afternoon update]
An analysis of Amy Coney Barrett’s legal philosophy.
Based on this, I’d prefer Willett, but it looks like Trump is fascinated by the idea of nominating an actual conservative (and relatively young, for longevity, and attractive) woman. And the nomination would make the Left’s collective head explode, as well as making it more difficult for Murkowski and Collins to vote against.
[Bumped]
Gettysburg
It’s the 155th anniversary of the battle: Six life lessons.
[Update late afternoon]
“No substitute for total victory.”
Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, but if it does, the Democrats will lose again. Because they’re not liberals.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Reading through, I saw this:
That the Democrats sorely miss Obama — a prize con man all his life — is no surprise. Their superannuated party is visibly falling apart, and the fact that the Democrat-Media Complex instantaneously made a star out of a young woman nobody had ever heard of before Tuesday’s New York primaries tell you all you need to know about how desperate they are.
The Democrats, however, should be directing their anger not at Trump and the Republicans, but at themselves. Had they let Hillary have her turn in 2008, instead of roundheeling for Barry, she very well might have won against either McCain or Romney and then passed the baton to Obama who, with four to eight years’ more seasoning, would have been perfectly positioned to finish the “progressive” demolition of America.
As usual, however, they let their passions control their heads and just couldn’t wait to “make history” (like all true Marxists, they’re obsessed with history) by nominating the first plausible black (or, more accurately, mixed-race) candidate for president, and so got ahead of themselves when they should have been taking the long view. By the time Mrs. Clinton’s turn finally came around — and only after rigging the primaries in order to be able to defeat the aging communist Bernie Sanders — who wasn’t even a registered Democrat — she was flyblown and shopworn. A more mature Obama would have been a very dangerous individual indeed, but the still-youthful Barry of 2008-16 was, luckily for us, too indolent and obsessed with golf and hip-hop parties to do as much damage as he might have.
That was their second big mistake (well, third, if you count health care and gun control in 1993, which ended up giving the Republicans Congress for the first time in four decades). If they had removed Clinton in 1999, as they should have, and installed Gore, he’d have almost certainly won in 2000.