Memorial Day

I was thinking of Memorial Day and the weekend attached to it.  My thoughts went immediately on the lives of my grandparents who all have passed on some time ago.  I have many great memories of them and the experiences we had together.  I also have many friends and acquaintances who have suffered disease and accident that have taken their lives.

The real purpose for the consecration of this day is to ponder those who have fought for our liberty.  At the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, looking out on Arlington certainly is most poignant.  Other military cemeteries I have visited give the same result, a profound feeling of indebtedness for those who paid far more than I have.

My nephew is now flying Blackhawks in Afghanistan and we are full of hope that he will be safe, as well as all the other military who are serving there and around the world.  Memorial Day?  The Warriors of Liberty and our ancestors are those we ought to ponder; at least from time to time this weekend.

The Flowers Are Starting to Really Talk

Our gardens have really started blooming the last couple of weeks.  We have planted a few things but the perennials we have had for some years have matured and are really doing their job.  Looking out the windows while dining is quite a treat.

John Wayne on Liberalism

I came across this quite by accident.  This interview was done in 1975.  Sounds quite prescient.

White Guilt

I came across this little book the other day and to tell you the truth I don't know how.  But I read it today.  It is 180 pages of fascinating light thrown on a subject I have wondered about from my observations of life and people.  As I examine diversity and multiculturalism and all the PC stuff that is a part of life now I feel it has been much more destructive in human relations than anything I have seen or experienced.  This book White Guilt:  How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era by Shelby Steele is worth your time.  He talks of dissociation and the loss of moral authority because of conscious decisions that came about between the races and was inculcated in just about ever venue of life.  Read it.  Think about it.

Donors now "threatened" by IRS, Justice Dept

I noticed this story (Take a look for yourself.)  and wondered why a political campaign could threaten donors to somebody on the other side.

Churchill on Buffett

Thanks to Steve Hayward on Powerlineblog.com for this:

Churchill on the Buffett Rule

Since I was a couple days late with last week’s helping of Winston, I might as well do this week’s a day or two early, especially since I was reading the source material for this one just this morning—WSC’s 1937 essay about Franklin Roosevelt.  Obama (and Buffett the Buffoon) ought to read this warning, one of several, that Churchill offered about the New Deal:

A second danger to President Roosevelt’s valiant and heroic experiments seems to arise from the disposition to hunt down rich men as if they were noxious beasts.  It is a very attractive sport, and once it gets started quite a lot of people everywhere are found ready to join in the chase.  Moreover, the quarry is at once swift and crafty, and therefore elusive.  The pursuit is long and exciting, and everyone’s blood is infected with its ardour.  The question arises whether the general well-being of the masses of the community will be advanced by an excessive indulgence in this amusement.  The millionaire or multi-millionaire is a highly economic animal.  He sucks up with sponge-like efficiency money from all quarters.  In this process, far from depriving ordinary people of their earnings, he launches enterprise and carries it through, raises values, and he expands that credit without which on a vast scale no fuller economic life can be opened to the millions.  To hunt wealth is not to capture commonwealth.
This money-gathering, credit-producing animal can not only walk—he can run.  And when frightened he can fly.  If his wings are clipped, he can dive or crawl.  When in the end he is hunted down, what is left but a very ordinary individual apologizing volubly for his mistakes, and particularly for not having been able to get away?
But meanwhile great constructions have crumbled to the ground.  Confidence is shaken and enterprise chilled, and the unemployed queue up at the soup kitchen or march out upon the public works with ever-growing expense to the taxpayer and nothing more appetizing to take home to their families than the leg or the wing of what was once a millionaire.  One quite sees that people who have got interested in this fight will not accept such arguments against their sport.  What they will have to accept is the consequences of ignoring such arguments.  It is indispensible to the wealth of nations and to the wage and life standards of labour, that capital and credit should be honoured and cherished partners in the economic system.
If this is rejected there is always, of course, the Russian alternative.  But no one can suppose that the self-reliant population of the United States, which cut down the forests and ploughed up the soil and laced the continent with railways, and carried the wealth-getting and wealth-diffusing to a higher point than has ever been reached by mankind, would be content for a week with the dull brutish servitude of Russia.

Human Animal

I pretty much do all the human animal stuff that is described in this video. I believe that the human animal stuff can be a part of either a man or a woman. It's trying to figure it out and not do it at the wrong time that seems to be the trick.