We live in an age of marvels

What will they think of next. Here's a new product that will help kids get their homework done.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/5343111/Ball-and-chain-to-force-children-to-study.html

Girls gone wild

Susan Whatshername seems to be suffering from Post Dramatic Stress Syndrome as a result of all the attention she's been receiving since she wowed the judges and the audience with her performance on Britain's Got Talent. According to this article in The Sun, Susan has a bit of a mouth on her. I think her mouth should be washed out with whatever they call soap over there in Blighty.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/tv/britain_got_talent/2451169/Susan-Boyles-two-four-letter-rants-in-one-day-Britains-got-Talent.html

And in equal opportunity news, Brenda Lee, a reporter and self proclaimed Roman Catholic Priestess, showed up in in a self described cassock at the Los Angeles airport and got into a bit of a tiff with the Secret Service because they wouldn't let her give a letter to President Obama. Besides getting mad at the Secret Service, she also got mad at the Associated Press photographer because she thought he was trying to take a picture up her dress when they carried her away to the funny farm for observation.

Come to think of it the Secret Service guys were just doing their job; but maybe she's right about that Associate Press photographer. Maybe he was trying to take a picture up her dress, the pervert.

The whole situation sounds quite stresful. I hope she's not suffering from Post Photographic Stress Syndrome.

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Reporter-Dragged-Kicking-and-Screaming-From-Near-Air-Force-One-.html

Consider yourself warned that if you follow the links that are contained in the story about Brenda Lee you will find some strange stuff that is only believed in isolated parts of Georgia and in Reverend Wright's church in Chicago.

But, one sometimes finds gold amidst straw. The paragraph at the bottom of Brenda's latest article in the Georgia Informer about Catholic Priests exercising modern day Droite de Seigneur privileges is. . . is. . . is. . . let's just say that paragraph is startlingly inventive. I hope Brenda writes more before the aliens come back to get her for more experiments.

Vive La France

Here's an excellent video from Reason.tv that gives you an idea of what to expect after President Obama makes this country more like France.

http://reason.tv/video/show/773.html

Veronique de Rugy has it exactly right. It's one thing to visit France; but another thing entirely to live there.

And, in other news, here's a preview of a scary new movie. Warning, it has violence, hysteria and a brief appearance by Vice President Joseph Biden.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6duTolZMGmI

Who is John Galt, er, Tom Golisano?

When lifelong committed lefties like tom Golisano start talking and writing things that could have been pulled from the pages of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged you know things are getting tense on the taxation front.

The irony, of course, is that once Golisano gets established as a Florida resident he will immediately start voting for new tax and spend laws that will eventually make Florida as dysfunctional and corrupt as New York.

Interesting quotes:

"Politicians like to talk about incentives -- for businesses to relocate, for example, or to get folks to buy local. After reviewing the new budget, I have identified the most compelling incentive of all: a major tax break immediately available to all New Yorkers. To be eligible, you need do only one thing: move out of New York state."

". . . the top 1 percent of earners account for about 50 percent of state revenue and are the ones who can and will leave. "

"Like I said, I love New York. But I'm not going to pay any more for the waste, corruption and inefficiency that is New York state government."

Wesley Mouch, er, Barack Obama, better get on this quick. Surely he can find some way to chain Tom Golisano and the other rich traitors to their homes in high tax states. President Obama should consider getting congress to pass a new law making it illegal for people to move across state lines without permission. It wouldn't be hard to draft such a law since the old USSR had one whose language can be copied. Or, President Obama could have his attorney general get a copy of Atlas Shrugged and just copy the Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Bill or the Equalization of Opportunity bill that Wesley Mouch put into effect.

You can read the whole thing at the link below.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/05202009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/adios__new_york_170074.htm?&page=0

Hat tip to Kathry Jean Lopez of National Review whose post on The Corner led me to this New York Post column.

The wisdom of the ages

We ignore folk wisdom at our peril.

For instance: I've always remembered Pop as saying that you shouldn't plant your garden until May 20th because of the danger of frost. Sam, on the other hand, has always claimed that Pop's edict was that you can plant anytime after Mother's Day. We've gone around about this for years; and for years Sam has maintained that I've been planting too late.

Like the slow drip. . . drip. . . drip of Chinese Water Torture, uh, Chinese Intensive Interrogation, Sam's constant negative feedback and Al Gore's incessant harping about global warming have weakened my allegiance to my own remembrance. So here I am on May 18th with all my carefully nurtured tomato and swiss chard and zucchini and cucumber plants already set out in the garden; and Linda mentioned this morning that they're predicting possible frost tonight.

Now, in a proper world, a mob of us peasants would rise up and go on a rampage with our shovels and rakes and hoes. We would put a dunce cap on Sam and equip him with a set of flimsy wings with which to stir the air over the tender tomato plants. And we would then storm off to capture Al Gore, the false Shaman, so as to render him down for fat to fuel smudge pots. The renderings from Al would fuel a lot of smudge pots and thus save a lot of crops.

But. . but. . . unfortunately we can't do those things, just yet. . . because the folly of the whole global warming hysteria has not yet become clear to enough of the population.

So instead we are reduced to reliance on our own singular efforts. In my own case I'm okay; because it happens that yesterday Linda replaced the living room drapes. The lining of the old drapes is a very thin material which will make perfect plant caps. You can bet that I'll be cursing later today as I go about tenting all the plants.

Meanwhile: in other news, Alec Baldwin has the Filipino segment of the great global multicultural community a tad upset. Alec was joking the other day about importing a Filipino mail order bride for breeding purposes; and it seems that Ramon Revilla, a senator in the Phillippines, was not amused. He threatened to open a big can of whup-ass on Alec.

For myself, I wasn't terribly offended by Alec's remarks about mail order brides because I'm not Filipino. But I was wondering how it is that Alec didn't get some negative feedback from the Gaia community for wanting more children, they being bad for the environment and all. And that got me to wondering how it is that Baldwin is still here in the United States. As I recall Alec was one of the lefty idiots who threatened to leave the country in the event George W. Bush was re-elected back in 2004. Why is Alec Baldwin still here in the U.S. spouting his racial hatred? Shouldn't he be, like overseas somewhere, like maybe in The Phillippines?

And another thing. How is it that President Barack Obama's continuance of George W. Bush's evil war in Iraq has not caused lefties like Alec Baldwin to go ballistic? Back before the recent election I distinctly recall being reminded that the war in Iraq was evil and that it was moreover causing terrible problems because it was costing $8 Billion per month.

Well, here we are, well into President Barack Obama's new Hope and Change regime, and Barry has found time to spend like many trillions of dollars on Hopey Changey stuff; but somehow he hasn't found time to end the war in Iraq, which was just funded by Obama's Democratic Party controlled congress for another eight months at the rate of, uh, $8 Billion per month. Surely the left still cares about that $8 Billion per month.

And surely President Obama wasn't lying back during the campaign when he constantly promised to end the war in Iraq and do a whole bunch of other Hopey Changey stuff like close the evil and illegal prison down in Guantanamo Bay where President Bush put all those misunderstood sons of liberty who our military captured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thinking about President Obama has me remembering some old wisdom of Aunt Mary R's. During virtually any discussion of politicians she would remind you that "they're all whoremasters." She couldn't get away with saying that today of course because calling Barack Obama a whoremaster, or criticizing him in any way, would quickly be denounced as racism by the baying leftist pack, he being half Kenyan and all.

If President Obama was half Filipino, apparently, anybody could go on national TV like Alec Baldwin and joke about buying one of his daughters with a credit card on EBay and having her shipped to his home for breeding, and none of the politically correct crowd of race hustlers would turn a hair.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D988KQ001&show_article=1

Update: In other news, our pal Alec Baldwin has suddenly discovered that he hates Detroit cars and wants to see U.S. auto workers out of work after shilling for Chevy Tahoes for years. And he goes on and on about global warming despite the fact that he wants to wants to buy and import a Filipino to make another carbon spewing offspring. Do the United Auto Workers Union and the National Organization for Women know about this guy?

http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmU4YzVlYWExNzMxOTU2NDlhMDA2MjgyM2FjMTg5ZGM=

Hat Tip to Greg Pollowitz, of National Review's blog Planet Gore, who evidently has a strong enough stomach to keep a closer eye on Alec Baldwin than I do.

Mangia, mangia, tuta cosa

Forget about buying cookbooks. Clara Cunnicciari will teach you to cook for free. I'm going to serve Linda her poor man's meal one of these nights, right after I remember to make lobscouse.

The best part about Clara is that she's so absent minded. In her pepper and eggs video she said she never uses a cutting board; in this video she pulls out a cutting board. Also, in this video she tells the same story twice within a couple of minutes. Plus, she makes you cringe from the way she's handling a knife; it's surprising she still has all her fingers at 91 years old.

She'd better hurry and make all the videos she wants to make before the nanny state people take away her knives and disconnect her stove.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OPQqH3YlHA&feature=channel

Wow! Even the Spender in Chief is starting to get it

"We can’t keep on just borrowing. . . We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”

What a shocking statement! And what's even more shocking is that it wasn't made by some dreary economist or some boring anal-retentive accountant. It was made by none other than President Barack Obama, the Spender in Chief, the Guns and Butter Guy, the Damn the Torpedoes, Full Spend Ahead Guy. And he made that statement a few days after he signed the largest deficit spending budget in all of recorded time.

Duh!

And double duh!

Last year the man promised not to increase taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000. And he promised expensive goodies to every special interest group this side of Pluto. And 53% of you all elected him on those promises. And here we are, less than four months into his time in office, and now he tells us that chickens have an unfortunate tendency to come home to roost, to borrow a colorful phrase.

Here's a news bulletin for you. President Obama can tax every penny that the rich earn and it won't pay for more than a small down payment on the trillions and trillions of new spending bills that Nancy Pelosi and her pals in congress passed and that he quickly signed into law, breaking another one of his promises, which was that his new Hope and Change administration would post all new laws on the internet so everybody could see what he was doing.

The government can only pay for its spending in three ways. It can tax, it can borrow, or it can print money. It's already taxing at near the limit of what it can without dipping into the pockets of the middle class and the working class for a lot bigger chunk of their earnings. It's already borrowing at about the limit of what it can without causing those pesky foreigners to demand higher interest payments on the already existing huge government bond debt. And it's already printing at the rate of about a hundred billion per month.

For now the Obama economy appears to be working; but it's working like an old car whose radiator is overheating while it's driving on the level. The minute the world economy begins to recover from the recession interest rates are going to shoot up fast and high. That will choke off the recovery. Google stagflation if you have time to learn a little about economics and rational expectations and negative feedback.

Meanwhile, you can read all about President Obama's sudden discovery of basic economics in the Bloomberg article I've linked to below.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aJsSb4qtILhg&refer=worldwide

It's a great time to be alive; but a pall is settling over the world

Mark Steyn recetnly gave a great speech at Hillsdale College. Here are a few paragraphs:

""Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor," wrote Charles Murray in In Our Hands. "When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome."

The key word here is "give." When the state "gives" you plenty—when it takes care of your health, takes cares of your kids, takes care of your elderly parents, takes care of every primary responsibility of adulthood—it's not surprising that the citizenry cease to function as adults: Life becomes a kind of extended adolescence—literally so for those Germans who've mastered the knack of staying in education till they're 34 and taking early retirement at 42. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912. He understood that the long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.

Genteel decline can be very agreeable—initially: You still have terrific restaurants, beautiful buildings, a great opera house. And once the pressure's off it's nice to linger at the sidewalk table, have a second café au lait and a pain au chocolat, and watch the world go by. At the Munich Security Conference in February, President Sarkozy demanded of his fellow Continentals, "Does Europe want peace, or do we want to be left in peace?" To pose the question is to answer it. Alas, it only works for a generation or two. And it's hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latterday Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in."

The entire speech is here: http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp

A trillion here a trillion there

First a warning. The five minute video at the post below is about a very boring subject and your share of the loot they're talking about is only $30,000, so it may not be worth your time.

I'm not the most careful person in the world about balancing our checkbook; and I'm even less careful about doing anything that can be called budgeting; but it's just a little shocking to find out the the Federal Reserve doesn't regularly balance its multi-trillion dollar checkbook. And it's even more shocking that the Federal Reserve doesn't keep track on who it sends the trillions to and how much it gets paid back.

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/05/federal-reserve-can-not-account-for-9.html

And, in lighter news: The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about Italian bicycle racing, which, unsurprisingly, is far more manly and authentic than the sissified French variety.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124209602462609577.html#mod%3Darticle-outset-box%26articleTabs%3Dcomments

Fry me kangaroo brown, Sport

The title of this science article was too good to change. Gino's in Norristown may have been way ahead of the curve on reducing greenhouse gases. They were rumored to be serving kangaroo meat hamburgers way back in the 1960's.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080811074908.htm

And, in related news: it turns out that cows are 25 percent less gassy if you're careful what you feed them. I could have told them that.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090507145752.htm

And, proving that some scientists aren't getting enough brain food in their diets, these fellows just discovered that you gain weight if you eat more.

Their stunning conclusion - "To return to the average weights of the 1970s, we would need to reverse the increased food intake of about 350 calories a day for children (about one can of fizzy drink and a small portion of French fries) and 500 calories a day for adults (about one large hamburger)," Swinburn said. "Alternatively, we could achieve similar results by increasing physical activity by about 150 minutes a day of extra walking for children and 110 minutes for adults, but realistically, although a combination of both is needed, the focus would have to be on reducing calorie intake."

I would sure love to have a couple of pieces of the pizza that the mildly chubby kid in the picture is scarfing down. I bet he would love it even better if it had pepperoni on it.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090508045321.htm

Finally, in completely unrelated news: Antiques Roadshow junkies can find a virtually unlimited number of appraisals to waste time watching at pbs.org. And those who are truly desperate can find unlimited timewasters at hulu.com

At least the recent monsoon didn't drive any of these into the house

Little ants are busy making a nest in our mailbox and box turtles are fleeing in panic to higher ground. Both the insects and the reptiles are reacting to the fact we've had over six inches of rain here in the past week or so. Yesterday they could have filmed a Bollywood celebrate the coming of the monsoon dance number on our lawn. This morning they could have filmed a new Godzilla versus Mothra movie down at the creek, co-starring the insane goose that spent an hour or so maniacally splashing under the bridge.

I haven't seen any of these (http://news.aol.com/article/giant-spiders-invade-town/466956?icid=mainmaindl1link4http%3A%2F%2Fnews.aol.com%2Farticle%2Fgiant-spiders-invade-town%2F466956) yet; but I'm keeping a wary eye out.

In other nature news, the bad linear growing bamboo is making an unbelievably vigorous break for freedom this spring. Shoots are coming up all over the place in an area about fifty feet in diameter around the main clump. It's an impressive but, I fear (hope?), futile effort. As soon as the ground dries up, if it ever dries up, I'll introduce those new shoots to my friend John Deere. Hopefully the box turtles will all be wise enough lay low. I really don't want to know if Mr. Deere can beat his existing fifty or so yard record for flinging half of a turtle.

In completely unrelated news, my barber at the Quick Cuts this morning was, I think, Charlie Jiggs great grandson. My unsureness comes from the fact that he was a little confused as to whether his grandfather was a part time barber and he had never heard talk of the Redpeppers or of a cousin Gussie P. So he may be descended from another Charlie P in Norristown. He's going to send me his email address so I can send him a picture of the Redpeppers to show his uncle Steve. There was a Stevie Jiggs in Pop's generation as I recall, brother to Frankie, Louie and Charlie; but I don't think we ever met him.

In still other news, I bought a couple of red sweet pepper plants at the Redners. I fear my garden is going to be as overcrowded as always again this year, even though I've almost doubled its size. I have 16 tomatoes, six zucchinis, four cucumbers and a whole bunch of swiss chard to squeeze in there. And that assumes I give Sam, Jase and Marianne some of the truly excessive number of cherry tomato swiss chard plants that I started from seed as an insurance policy against cutworms, rabbits, groundhogs, rampaging birds, etc. There's no worry about the deer since I'll be fortifying the new larger garden as well as last year's circle.

Update: I just introduced the cute little ants to Mr. Raid. Au revoir little ants.

And, I just opened an email from Don A down in Florida that included this link to the worlds neatest train set. If Naz has access to the internet he will go nuts over this train layout. Well worth the five minutes or so. This train set is as elaborate as the Barbarossa plan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN_oDdGmKyA&feature=player_embedded

Why indeed?

President Obama has gone out of his way to kill the Washington D.C. education vouchers program despite the fact that he is sending his own daughters to a private school and despite the fact that he has fought to shower money on virtually everything else in the country.

Veronique de Rugy of National Review linked to an interesting short video in which the mother of one of the children affected, a woman who marched for Obama, asks "Why?".

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzU2YzFjMTBlMTA4NDk2Zjk4N2Q4MDE2YzVmOTNkMDY=

The state of inner city public school education in this country has been far worse than merely shameful for decades. City governments and the the state and federal governments spend more and more while the inner city public schools achieve less and less. Meanwhile the teachers unions and other special interests fight any program, such as education vouchers, that attempts to do something concrete and measurable about the problem. It's hard to avoid coming to the conclusion that the teachers unions and the politicians who control education are actively working to ensure that inner city people remain uneducated. At very best the teachers unions and city politicians don't give a damn.

Jas is down in Florida or I would ask him about this

While Jas and Kathy are busy enjoying themselved down in The Villages there has been shocking new research that may explain global warming. I went down to Jas's Post Office to try to get the Postal Service's official explanation; but the clerk yelled at me to "Get lost, Schmuck!" just like she yelled at the six people ahead of me in the line that snaked through the piles and boxes of undelivered mail in the lobby.

http://joannenova.com.au/2009/05/03/shock-global-temperatures-driven-by-us-postal-charges/

Not that I'm complaining, but both of my faithless brothers have been completely incommunicado since they went to Florida. They don't call, they don't write; it's like they've fallen off the face of the earth. I called Al R on Saturday morning, so I know that Jas was still alive and had been seen as of Friday of last week; but for all I know he and Sam may have been eaten by boa constrictors or alligators out on one of the golf courses since then.

Linda and I are bearing up as well as we can under the strain. On Saturday night we managed to combine the Chasse' with our former Waltz routine up at the Ballroom on High where there was pleasingly sparse attendance, so the dance floor was relatively open for experimentation. Dawn, Barb and Patsy all asked where Jas and Kathy were and how they were doing. I had to tell them that I had heard nothing.

A great history lesson

Cossetted idiots have been blathering about war crimes a lot recently because three (yes 3) Al Quaeda big shots were waterboarded in order to cause them to talk about the plans and makeup of their organization. Most of the posturing is politically motivated; but there are actually some truly amazing idiots out there who think war is some kind of refereed sport whose rules can be neatly written down in a book like the rules for a baseball game. It simply isn't so, and it never will be so.

This moral backbiting game recently resulted in comedian John Stewart parrotting the increasingly but wrongly held idea that President Harry Truman's use of the atomic bombs against Japan was unnecessary and a war crime. The only thing nice that can be said about people who believe that is that they may deserve some leniency by reason of insanity or by virtue of lack of education about the attitudes of the leaders of Japan and the attitudes of a significant portion of the Japanese people during World War II.

Later John Stewart turned around and retracted his judgement of Harry Truman as a war criminal, probably because he was informed by his horrified writers and political commissars that Truman was a Democrat. He was probably also informed that Truman was the immediate successor to Franklin D. Roosevelt who is a Democratic Party Saint, in part because he ordered the development of the atomic bombs and the long range B29 bombers which Truman later used to drop them on Japan. The only reason Roosevelt himself didn't order the use of the atomic bombs was because they weren't ready before he died. You can be sure of that because Roosevelt never shrank from ordering the firebombing of cities, though, and the firebombing attacks killed many more people than the atomic bomb attacks.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not attacking Roosevelt or Truman for those decisions. They were running this country during a war to the death. Based on lot of reading I think they prosecuted that war with reasonable competence and reasonable humanity given the nature of the times and the nature of the other combatant nations.

Here is a video takedown of the whole concept of the atomic bombing of Japan as a war crime. It's excellent.

http://www.pjtv.com/video/Afterburner_/The_True_Story_of_the_Atomic_Bombs/1808/

I feel like I wasted my time in college

Relative to these guys I was very lazy during my college days. I never applied myself as much as these guys obviously have.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZjZkNzY0ODA4MmY1MjMwNzRjMGI2N2IwNGMwYzBkNTI=