It’s like a bicycle, or swimming. Once you learn you never forget.
I, too, still double clutch on downshifts. No way back into first gear of a sixties British sports car without it.
Category Archives: History
Fixing Broken Bread
An interesting article on going back to pre-industrial wheat.
It isn’t clear the degree to which grain is intrinsically bad for us, and to which it’s been made much worse by the current varieties and processing methods.
I found this an interesting statement: “The giant band of wheat that stripes the center of America is a byproduct of the industrial age.”
That could be said of many unhealthy things, including the public school system.
Our Credentialed Betters
Apparently, credentialed doesn’t indicate educated.
You’d think he might have Googled the word before making an asshat of himself.
“I Love Free Speech…”
…but:
In less awful news, 95 percent of the students surveyed said that free speech is important to them. However, as I have long predicted and discussed, when you ask Americans if they like free speech, they nearly always say “yes.” But when you get into the nitty gritty details about what kind of speech warrants protection, you discover that some folks (especially college students) are more in the “I love free speech, but…” camp. And I fear the list of exceptions is growing larger by the day.
Not sure which is more dismaying, that they’re unaware of the First Amendment, or that they oppose it. But clearly the Left is continuing its march through the institutions. Which is why books like this one could be very valuable:
Why a father-son collaboration? That’s what I wanted to know, too, so I asked the elder Paulsen, who was a year ahead of me at Yale Law School. Mike reported that he had given a lecture at Princeton in 2006, after which the law professors and college professors at dinner complained about their students’ “goofed-up ideas” about the Constitution. The law professors blamed the college professors, the college professors said “they came to us this way,” and blamed pervasively bad ideas about the Constitution in the culture, the media and even textbooks. Stuck in an airport the next day, Prof. Paulsen killed time writing an outline.
If they can get them to read it. The problem starts in kindergarten, and extends all the way into post-docs.
Fred Hof
“I was wrong“:
I’ve indicated I admire Hof’s honesty and courage in admitting this. But that doesn’t mean I admire everything about him. For example, why didn’t he speak up in September of 2012, which after all was prior to Obama’s re-election? Might it have mattered? I really don’t know, but maybe. And why, oh why, had this very smart man not noticed that the biggest “policy priority” of the Obama administration has long been politics and spinning to political advantage?
Seriously, by March of 2012, how could he have not realized this? His bio doesn’t say much about his political affiliation—I would guess “Democrat” and probably “liberal Democrat”—and this is the most likely explanation for his failure to notice things that were absolutely obvious but would mean splitting with the party.
And there is no more unforgivable thought crime than splitting with the Party, regardless of the damage to the nation
The West
Is it slip slipping away? Many seem determined to grease the skids. And as noted, the picture of the European “defence ministers” is less than inspiring.
Bob Woodward
…is sounding both partisan and senile on Fox News Sunday. No one is accusing Clinton of a crime in Benghazi. Her crimes have to do with her handling of email. But that’s no excuse for the Democrats to pretend that there’s nothing there, and run interference for her. This has been policitized, but as always, it’s politicized by Democrats who refuse to hold members of their own party accountable for anything.
Cats
The endless debate: Are they domesticated? I think ours is, pretty much, but then, I think females are more than males. They don’t tend to wander as much, in my experience. Rerun doesn’t go more than a house or so away, AFAIK.
Peggy Noonan
Sorry, like David Brooks, she forfeited any reasons to take her views seriously in 2008. It was perfectly obvious to many of us that Barack Obama was a radical (he told us so himself, in his pledge to “fundamentally transform America”), in his years in Wright’s pews, in his associations with Ayers and Khalidi, in his socialist run in the 90s with the New Party, in his seeking of Marxists in college. I was right, she was wrong.
Lyndon Johnson’s Daily Brief
I’ve been looking forward to this. Some formerly classified documents from the Apollo era have emerged.