Shamelessly Stolen...

 ...one of my two favorite posts by Gerard. (The other is World Demo Day.)

How Beautiful We Were

by VANDERLEUN on JANUARY 20, 2021

A short list. In no particular order.

We had car shows, boat shows, beauty shows, and dog shows.

We ran robots on the surface of Mars by remote control.

Our women came from all over the world in all shapes and sizes and hues and scents.

We actually believed that all men are created equal and tried to make it come true.

Everybody liked our movies and loved our television shows.

We tried to educate everybody, whether they wanted it or not. Sometimes we succeeded.

We did Levis.

We held the torch high and hundreds of millions came. No matter what the cost.

We saved Europe twice and liberated it once.

We believed so deeply and so abidingly in free speech that we protected and honored and, in some cases, even elected traitors.

We let you be as freaky as you wanted to be.

We paid you not to plant crops and not to work.

We died in the hundreds of thousands to end slavery here. And when that was done continued to fight to end slavery for a century and a half after all around the world.

We invented Jazz.

We wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg address.

We went to the moon to see how far we could hit a golf ball.

We lifted a telescope into orbit that could see to the edge of the universe.

When people snuck into the country against our laws, we made parking lots and food stands off to the side of the road so they wouldn’t get hurt, and we let them use our hospitals for free, and we made their children citizens.

We didn’t care what God you worshipped as long as we could worship ours.

We let the People arm themselves at will. Just to make sure.

We gave everybody the vote.

We built Disneyworld. Just for fun.

We had a revolution so successful it was still going strong two and a quarter centuries later.

We had so many heroes, even at the end, that we felt free to hate them and burn them in effigy.

We electrified the guitar.

We invented a music so compelling that it rocked the world.

We had some middling novelists.

We had some interesting painters.

We had some pretty good poets.

We had better songwriters.

We ran our farms so well we fed the globe.

We made the automobile and the airplane.

We let you get rich. Really, really rich.

We didn’t care who you were or what you were or where you came from or who your parents were. We just cared about what you made or what you did.

We had poor people who, even at their most wretched, were richer than any other poor people on the face of the planet.

We were the noblest nation the world had ever known.

We had so much freedom that many of us voted to just throw it all away.

Even towards the end, as we dissolved into the petty bickering and idle entertainments that come with having far too much leisure and money, many among us were still striving to make it higher, finer, brighter, better, and more beautiful.

Even towards the end, the best of us declined to give up and pressed on. “Where to? What next?”

Merry Christmas

BUMPED for this year.

So, I have my wish list for Christmas/birthday parsed out over at Amazon, as I promised my daughter. The first round of shopping is done. Reminds me, I met a young woman the other day, as she was signing for a package. I asked her last name for my delivery app. She responded:

"Bezos. But I pay for Prime."

I'm once again posting the egg nog recipe, and this year, adding a bit of humorous parenting advice:

Ike's egg nog:

Parenting advice:

Cardinal Vigano's Letter to President Trump

The election tomorrow is about more than Trump vs. Biden, according to the Cardinal:

From Gerard's American Digest.

Easy, Simple Voting Decision Tool:

 Why Did it Have to be … Guns? by L. Neil Smith

Over the past 30 years, I’ve been paid to write almost two million words, every one of which, sooner or later, came back to the issue of guns and gun-ownership. Naturally, I’ve thought about the issue a lot, and it has always determined the way I vote.

People accuse me of being a single-issue writer, a single-issue thinker, and a single-issue voter, but it isn’t true. What I’ve chosen, in a world where there’s never enough time and energy, is to focus on the one political issue which most clearly and unmistakably demonstrates what any politician — or political philosophy — is made of, right down to the creamy liquid center.

Make no mistake: all politicians — even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership — hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it’s an X-ray machine. It’s a Vulcan mind-meld. It’s the ultimate test to which any politician — or political philosophy — can be put.

If a politician isn’t perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash — for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything — without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn’t your friend no matter what he tells you.

If he isn’t genuinely enthusiastic about his average constituent stuffing that weapon into a purse or pocket or tucking it under a coat and walking home without asking anybody’s permission, he’s a four-flusher, no matter what he claims.

What his attitude — toward your ownership and use of weapons — conveys is his real attitude about you. And if he doesn’t trust you, then why in the name of John Moses Browning should you trust him?

If he doesn’t want you to have the means of defending your life, do you want him in a position to control it?

If he makes excuses about obeying a law he’s sworn to uphold and defend — the highest law of the land, the Bill of Rights — do you want to entrust him with anything?

If he ignores you, sneers at you, complains about you, or defames you, if he calls you names only he thinks are evil — like “Constitutionalist” — when you insist that he account for himself, hasn’t he betrayed his oath, isn’t he unfit to hold office, and doesn’t he really belong in jail?

Sure, these are all leading questions. They’re the questions that led me to the issue of guns and gun ownership as the clearest and most unmistakable demonstration of what any given politician — or political philosophy — is really made of.

He may lecture you about the dangerous weirdos out there who shouldn’t have a gun — but what does that have to do with you? Why in the name of John Moses Browning should you be made to suffer for the misdeeds of others? Didn’t you lay aside the infantile notion of group punishment when you left public school — or the military? Isn’t it an essentially European notion, anyway — Prussian, maybe — and certainly not what America was supposed to be all about?

And if there are dangerous weirdos out there, does it make sense to deprive you of the means of protecting yourself from them? Forget about those other people, those dangerous weirdos, this is about you, and it has been, all along.

Try it yourself: if a politician won’t trust you, why should you trust him? If he’s a man — and you’re not — what does his lack of trust tell you about his real attitude toward women? If “he” happens to be a woman, what makes her so perverse that she’s eager to render her fellow women helpless on the mean and seedy streets her policies helped create? Should you believe her when she says she wants to help you by imposing some infantile group health care program on you at the point of the kind of gun she doesn’t want you to have?

On the other hand — or the other party — should you believe anything politicians say who claim they stand for freedom, but drag their feet and make excuses about repealing limits on your right to own and carry weapons? What does this tell you about their real motives for ignoring voters and ramming through one infantile group trade agreement after another with other countries?

Makes voting simpler, doesn’t it? You don’t have to study every issue — health care, international trade — all you have to do is use this X-ray machine, this Vulcan mind-meld, to get beyond their empty words and find out how politicians really feel. About you. And that, of course, is why they hate it.

And that’s why I’m accused of being a single-issue writer, thinker, and voter.

But it isn’t true, is it?

Permission to redistribute this article is herewith granted by the author — provided that it is reproduced unedited, in its entirety, and appropriate credit given. lneil@lneilsmith.org

(HT:  Gerard at American Digest on OCTOBER 15, 2020)

Justice Ginsberg

I never really followed the goings-on at the Supreme Court. The last confirmation hearing whs quite the to-do and I followed it, but that wasn't so much court, as Congress. I know very little about any of the Justices, except what I read news.

I gather Justice Ginsburg tended to vote Liberal, which I suppose is why the Democrats are in Yet Another Meltdown over what President Trump may do. 

That said, I have raised, as a resource, my very own lawyer in the family, and she has put together her thoughts at Justice Ginsburg's passing.They are up on her new blog, to which I kindly refer you: 

I know I'm her Dad, but, in my humble opinion, the kid can write.

Buy A Nun A Book Day

...is approaching again - September 17.  Once again, I will be sending books to the good Holy Names Sisters who taught me in my callow youth.

It's a nice way to say "Thanks"!

Kamala Harris, Before After, and After After

This photo of Ms. Harris that is making the rounds has me a bit ticked off. Not because it is making fun of her, which I'm very OK with, but because the picture itself is so obviously not a good, publication grade pic.

The story is that sometime in the last month or so, she had 'some work' done. No bi deal. But many Tweeps are passing this pic around, claiming that this is her 'new' face.  (A face only The Joker could love, IMHO.) But it stinks to high heaven.  Her face is significantly out of focus.

In particular, look at the colors below her right cheek. The transition from light to darker (shaded) skin is way too grainy to have come directly from a studio camera, or, for that matter, a decent phone camera. Ether the image was captured with a 640x480 camera, or it has been 'de-rezzed', i.e., the pixle per inch value reduced somehow. 

(I make no call about the' how', just the 'what'.)

This one was taken over Joe Biden's shoulder, as he is calling Harris to offer her the VP job.  It looks like a real person's face. His res image of a high res image.

My point isn't to go off about 'poor Kamala'. She's a big girl, and should be able to take care of herself. Both sides do this - find a pic of a candidate that makes them look goofy, dumb, or evil, and run with it.  How many times have we seen the picture of AOC with her mouth in the bid 'O'? Ms. Omar looking smugly like the cat who just swallowed the proverbial canary. Or Ms. Talib just looking plain evil?  

I know that's done to support the story and the narrative. But the editorial decision to use such a bad quality image and promote it as ac accurate representation is editorial malpractice.

Our side, we, need to be better.