If it wasn’t for Halloween, this grotesque and useless gourd would be extinct. And good riddance.
Let’s. Review.
Somewhere dotted about the fruited plains of America something like lebenty-leben gazillion acres of pumpkins are planted every damn year. Then care and water and chemicals are slathered on these fibrous tumors causing them to grow big. Some very big. Some so big that they can be hoisted into the air, dropped onto a car and obliterate said automobile.
Many are midget pumpkins. This year I’m seeing teeny-weeny baby pumpkins ripe for pumpkin abuse. But most are middle to large hunks o’ pumpkin by the time they are “ready for the harvest.”
Sounds so pastoral, doesn’t it? “Ready for the harvest.” Except that when you actually “harvest” a plant the assumption is that, somewhere, somehow, some people are actually going to eat the thing.
This is the fate of only a smidgen of the pumpkins harvested. And even among those that actually eat of the pumpkin almost all are lying through their seeds when they say they like it. Pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread, even (shudder) roast pumpkin — all foul concoctions fit only for the martyr mothers among us.
I know that many will claim to adore pumpkin pie, but that too is mindless. Give me any thick paste and let me pour tons of cream, evaporated milk, pounds of sugar, scoops of cinnamon and nutmeg into a butter-laced and crisp pie crust and you’ll love it even if the base plant was black mold from the basement.
No, the pumpkin is not an acceptable food. But do we plow it under and eradicate it from our list of things we use farmland for? No. Because anything worth doing in America is worth overdoing, we expand the acres devoted to this parasite.
Gerard Vanderleun, “The Big Pumpkin (Dump)”, American Digest, 2018-09-22.
October 31, 2018
QotD: Pumpkins
October 30, 2018
QotD: The Progressive strategy
[T]he story of the progressive movement can best be understood as activists going wherever the field is open. If the people are on your side, expand democracy. If the people are against you, use the courts. If the courts are against you, run down the field with the bureaucrats, or the Congress, or the presidency. Procedural niceties — the filibuster, precedent, the law, custom, the Constitution, truth — only matter if they can be enlisted to advance the cause. If they can’t, they suddenly become outdated, irrelevant, vestigial organs of racism, elitism, sexism, whatever. Obstruction, or even inconvenience in the path of progressive ends is prima facie proof of illegitimacy. The river of history must carry forward. If History hits a rock, the rock must be swept up with the current or be circumvented. Nothing can hold back the Hegelian tide, no one may Stand Athwart History. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. This is the liberal gleichschaltung; get with the program or be flattened by it.
Jonah Goldberg, “Obama to Congress: It’s My Way or My Way”, National Review, 2014-11-21.
October 29, 2018
QotD: The very first Progressive president
I’m thinking of an American president who demonized ethnic groups as enemies of the state, censored the press, imprisoned dissidents, bullied political opponents, spewed propaganda, often expressed contempt for the Constitution, approved warrantless searches and eavesdropping, and pursued his policies with a blind, religious certainty.
Oh, and I’m not thinking of George W. Bush, but another “W” – actually “WW”: Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat who served from 1913 to 1921.
President Wilson is mostly remembered today as the first modern liberal president, the first (and only) POTUS with a PhD, and the only political scientist to occupy the Oval Office. He was the champion of “self determination” and the author of the idealistic but doomed “Fourteen Points” – his vision of peace for Europe and his hope for a League of Nations. But the nature of his presidency has largely been forgotten.
That’s a shame, because Wilson’s two terms in office provide the clearest historical window into the soul of progressivism. Wilson’s racism, his ideological rigidity, and his antipathy toward the Constitution were all products of the progressive worldview. And since “progressivism” is suddenly in vogue – today’s leading Democrats proudly wear the label – it’s worth actually reviewing what progressivism was and what actually happened under the last full-throated progressive president.
Jonah Goldberg, “You want a more ‘progressive’ America? Careful what you wish for: Voters should remember what happened under Woodrow Wilson”, Christian Science Monitor, 2008-02-05.
October 28, 2018
QotD: Revolutionary price controls and the plight of Washington’s army at Valley Forge
By the end of 1775, Congress had already increased the nation’s money supply by 50 percent in less than a year, and state paper issues had already begun in New England. The Congressional Continental bills followed what was to become a sequence all too familiar in the western world: runaway inflation. As paper money issues flooded the market, the dilution of the value of each dollar caused prices in terms of paper money to increase; since this included the prices of gold, silver, and foreign currencies, the value of the paper money declined in comparison to them. As usual, rather than acknowledge the inevitability of this sequence, the partisans of inflationary policies urged further accelerated paper issues to overcome the higher prices and searched for scapegoats to blame for the price rise and depreciation. The favorite scapegoats were merchants and speculators who persisted in doing the only thing they ever do on the market: they followed the push and pull of supply and demand. In another familiar attempt to deal with the problems of inflationary intervention, they outlawed the depreciation of paper, or the rise of prices.
[…]
State and local governments presumed to know what market prices of the various commodities should be, and laid down price regulations for them. Wage rates, transportation rates, and prices of domestic and imported goods were fixed by local authorities. Refusing to accept paper, accepting them for less than par, charging higher prices than allowed, were made criminal acts, and high penalties were set: they included fines, public exposure, confiscation of goods, tarring and feathering, and banishment from the locality. Merchants were prohibited from speculating, and thereby from bringing the needed scarce goods to the public. Enforcement was imposed by zealots in local and nearby committees, in a despotic version of the revolutionary tradition of government by local committees.
Price controls made matters far worse for everyone, especially the hapless Continental Army, since farmers were thereby doubly penalized: they were forced to sell supplies to the army at prices far below the market and they had to accept increasingly worthless Continentals in payment. Hence, they understandably sold their wares elsewhere; in many cases, they went “on strike” against the whole crazy-quilt system by retiring from the market altogether and raising only enough food to feed themselves and their own families. Others reverted to simple barter.
Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived In Liberty, Volume IV, 1979.
October 27, 2018
QotD: The gender pay-gap
If you mean the pay gap that exists between women, anybody with an ounce of statistical sense knows that it is insignificant when it comes to actual equivalent jobs with equivalent requirements. Once you factor in that women are statistically more likely to take time away from their careers for child rearing and factor that in, the pay difference is statistically insignificant. Unless you work in the Obama White House, because fuck you is why.
Men also tend to work more in dangerous or physically demanding jobs by choice, which also pay better. Nobody forces them to go into those fields. Men also get more STEM degrees and women get more LAS degrees. STEM pays better. Nobody is forcing these men to do math, but men and women are different. If you don’t understand why my accounting degree is more valuable that your gender studies degree, you don’t understand basic econ 101 and supply and demand. So yes, I would like fries with that.
If you mean the gender gap in voting between the parties, just about every psychological study ever conducted by somebody not huffing paint understands that women tend to make decisions more emotionally and men tend to make them more logically. I see you reaching for you Sexist Card, but I said tend. This is not always the case, it is simply a trend. If you don’t like it or find that sexist, you can fuck off and die. Men and women are different. Most of us happen to like that. Some men think more emotionally (like pajama boy metrosexual hipster douchebags for example), and some women think more logically (like hot republican warrior babes), but a trend is a trend.
Larry Correia, “Run Forrest Run!”, Monster Hunter Nation, 2014-11-05.
October 26, 2018
QotD: Mis-using statistics
You’re like that crazy hobo on the subway demanding everyone justify the moon ferrets. But moon ferrets aren’t real, so why waste a bunch of time explaining that to a stinky hobo. But I’ll try, because I’m a retired accountant, and when people like you try to use stats it is like watching a monkey humping a football. So amusing, but kind of sad.
Larry Correia, “Run Forrest Run!”, Monster Hunter Nation, 2014-11-05.
October 25, 2018
QotD: The unique situation of Israel
In 1948, one internationally recognized sovereign state (Israel) was invaded by the armies of various neighboring sovereign states (Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon). At the end of that war, much of the former British Mandate of Palestine was in Israeli hands, but the West Bank wound up with Jordan and the Gaza Strip with Egypt. Over the next two decades, nobody referred to Egypt’s or Jordan’s exercise of its sovereignty in those lands under loaded terms such as “settlement”.
In 1967, the Arabs tried again to wipe out Israel, and again failed. And this time their defeat was even more total: Egypt lost the Gaza Strip (and the Sinai) and Jordan lost the West Bank. That was half-a-century ago. One of the most basic laws of war is: to the victor the spoils. If you launch a war and you lose, then the guy who took your territory is the one who determines its future. Instead, the “international community” decided to intervene in the matter in a way it has in no other supposed boundary dispute.
Thus began the “Palestiniazation” of the problem. Uniquely in such matters, the victorious sovereign state is forbidden from returning the spoils of war to the defeated sovereign states – Jordan and Egypt. Instead, it can only treat with the designated representatives of “Palestine”, who … have no interest in nation-building, or capacity for it, only in Jew-killing.
To repeat: the “international community”‘s treatment of this issue is like no other boundary dispute of the last 200 years. Maybe that’s because this situation is unique to one small patch of land in the Middle East. Or maybe it’s because the “international community” really really doesn’t like Jews.
I say that Israel (independent since 1948), Jordan (1946) and Egypt (1922) are all sovereign states entitled to act in their own interests, and live with the consequences – especially after two or three generations.
Mark Steyn, “License to Dye”, Steyn Online, 2016-12-30.
October 24, 2018
QotD: The diminishing importance of the Russian revolution of 1917
Few 20th-century historians doubted that the 1917 Russian revolution was one of the most influential events of their time, indeed of all time. As the centenary commemoration approaches, however, it seems remarkable how far and how fast the ideology that inspired Lenin and millions of his worldwide followers has receded in significance. Many are the imperfections of capitalism, but almost nobody outside Jeremy Corbyn’s office any longer supposes that communism, least of all the old Soviet brand, offers a credible alternative. This would amaze our grandparents’ generation on both sides of the struggle.
The novels of C.P. Snow are indifferent fiction but intriguing middle-class social history. During the interwar era, many of the intelligent acquaintances of Lewis Eliot, Snow’s fictional alter ego, took it for granted that socialism, or perhaps communism, not only should but would prevail as the guiding doctrine of most democracies.
Lower down the social scale, Clyde shipworkers, indeed most of the world’s industrial classes, saw the Bolsheviks as harbingers of hope. The bayonets thrust into the bosoms of the imperial family in the cellar at Ekaterinburg roused a pleasurable frisson in some radical hearts. Ten Days that Shook the World, the American reporter John Reed’s eyewitness account of October 1917, conveys the thrill the revolution evoked among those who, like himself, considered capitalism doomed.
Max Hastings, “The centenary of the Russian revolution should be mourned, not celebrated”, The Spectator, 2016-12-10.
October 23, 2018
QotD: The boomers
How did my generation do? Well, we get blamed for being selfish and self-obsessed and soft and pushing up house prices and saddling the next generation with hideous debts and nowhere to live and I suppose that’s not entirely unfair.
We are ridiculously obsessed with food, buy too many things and have too many clothes. But we didn’t start a war. Well, not a big one. And we didn’t nuke anyone. We defused the Cold War. We believed in the collective good. Although we came to confuse gestures with actions and we think going on a march and writing a letter are the same as doing something, making the world better.
We were the generation that were relentlessly for civil rights, human rights, gay rights, disability rights, equality, fairness. We were implacably against racism and censorship. We defended freedom of speech, religion and expression. We will leave the world better fed and better off than when we arrived in it.
Britain is a far happier, richer and fairer place than it was 60 years ago. And if you think that’s wishful self-promotion, you have no idea how grim and threadbare Britain in the Fifties was. You weren’t there, you don’t remember.
A.A. Gill, “Life at 60”, Sunday Times, 2014-06-29.
October 22, 2018
QotD: Aging gracefully
Last year, for the first time, a young girl, French, offered me her seat on a crowded bus. I was surprised at how deeply I resented her. Health looms over the elderly like a threatening monsoon. No ache is innocuous. No lump or discoloured, sagging patch of body is ignorable except our toenails, which become the most sordidly repellent things in all nature. We covertly examine ourselves and our effluvia for the premonition of the dark humour that will carry us away. There is no such thing as a routine checkup. They are all life-or-death appointments.
Doctors start all their sentences with “It’s only …” But we’re not fooled. This generation is also the one that lingers longest over its departure. Death came to our grandparents with a clutched chest and a searing pain. For us it’s a slow, humiliating series of it’s onlys. What we worry about is dementia, a condition that did not exist in the popular lexicon when I was a child. Mind you, we also thought cancer was as shaming as divorce. Now Alzheimer’s is our abiding fear, the thing we can’t forget.
My chats with contemporaries are like bridge games where we try to fill in the gaps in each other’s sentences to make one coherent conversation. My dad died of Alzheimer’s. I once asked him how he was feeling: “Oh, quite well, except you know I’ve got this terrible disease, what’s its name?” So we go to the gym, we have trainers, I do Pilates. But it’s only maintenance. I’m not looking for a beach body, there’s no New Me in the cupboard; I just want one that’s supple enough to put on my own socks.
After giving up drink and drugs, I continued to smoke about 60 a day until 12 years ago and then I stopped. And people said, “Well done! How did you manage it? What willpower!”
It didn’t feel like well done. It felt like a defeat — the capitulation to fear. When I started smoking at 14 I was golden, immortal. I smoked around the world; I took pride in my ability to smoke with elegance, panache and skill. Smoking was my talent and I gave it up because I lost my nerve.
I don’t miss the cigarettes, but I do miss the me that smoked so beautifully.
A.A. Gill, “Life at 60”, Sunday Times, 2014-06-29.
October 21, 2018
QotD: Footnotes
The absence of footnote references from the pages of this book may aggrieve some readers but will, I hope, please a larger number, who do not care for the untidy and irritating modern fashion of treating any historical study as a card-index rather than a book to be read. Footnote references are an inevitable distraction to the reader’s eye and mind. The justification for omitting them is not, however, merely one of narrative smoothness and page cleanlinness. Such references are only of value to a small proportion of readers — as a means to personal research or composition. By direction the student’s attention to an isolated quotation or piece of evidence, such footnote references are apt to give this a flase value; and can also be the means of conveying a false impression. They may enable the student to find out whether the author’s use of a quotation is textually correct, but they do not enable him to find out whether it gives a correct impression. For the true worth of any quotation can only be told by comparison with the whole of the evidence on the subject. Further, the practice of littering the pages with references is not even a proof that the author has consulted the sources. It is easy to copy a quotation — complete with footnote references! — from some previous writer, and a study of books on the Civil War, especially, suggests that this labour-saving device is not uncommon.
B.H. Liddell Hart, Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American, 1928.
October 20, 2018
QotD: Women and violence
Activists for feminism are continually characterizing the world of women as one of terror, abuse, and uncertainty. For Leitch to take them at their word, applying a tough-on-criminals spin, is an authentic Trump touch. I do not wholly approve of the tactic, but, as much as I think some feminists are attention-hungry zanies, I recognize the kernel of truth in their image of the universe. I’ve never had a close female friend who could not tell of bizarre, creepy, threatening things happening to them — sights and encounters that, to a male with an ordinary upbringing, seem to have wriggled from the corner of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
[…]
The actual status of women is that they belong to the physically weaker sex. Biology has given male primates greater upper-body strength, stronger grip, and testosterone. Men commit the overwhelming majority of consequential violence everywhere in the world throughout all history. (Men’s rights advocates sometimes argue that women commit just as many violent acts as men, which misses the point by such a wide margin that it is the intellectual equivalent of throwing like a girl.)
Colby Cosh, “I’m with Leitch — give women pepper spray (but keep it from the men)”, National Post, 2016-12-05.
October 19, 2018
QotD: “None of us are standard issue”
Our own age, still, has the “image” of the mass-producing society that brought unparalleled prosperity and riches to the world in the last century (along with some truly horrible mass killings.)
The mass killings, Marxism (which people inhale without knowing, even in American Universities), behaviorism, and a passion for numbered, standardized everything are part of the ethos of the industrial age.
It is perhaps too much to ask people working on standard machines, to produce standard sizes, using standardized movements to conform to the machine’s mechanical exactness not to think in terms of “standard sizes” and “Models.”
You see this more strongly in the works of early science fiction writers, who expected psychology to to be standardized, numbered and filed and then all problems of mankind would be solved.
This stopped around the forties or fifties, when there was starting to be a suspicion that humans were not in fact standard issues, and that they had a disturbing tendency to be … human on an individual scale. I.e. “Nobody is normal” started penetrating the collective consciousness, but people STILL try to be normal. A part of the craze for transgenderism (other than that the progressives decided this was the next hill to die on) is this idea that there are standard models of people. Note I don’t say every transgender person is the result of that. There are cases of such profound mismatch between mind and body that even flawed and ultimately mutilating surgery (which is all we can do right now) is preferable to going on with the mismatch. These cases are, needless to say, very rare. But I swear at least half of the generation after my kids identifies as transgender, or gender queer, or gender fluid, or some other form of gender nonsense that has absolutely nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with the fact the poor dears have imbibed this flawed version of humanity as easily filable and definable. If you think that a girl who prefers trains and toy cars, a boy who prefers dolls […] a boy who is better at verbal than math, a girl who is the reverse, all of these are TOLD they are abnormal, if not in words, in the reaction of other people, until they feel they must have a problem.
In fact, none of us are standard issue. The very fact that, say, the medieval world, a communitarian world under stress (compared to us) of disease and famine, which needed to eliminate odds to operate, spent SO MUCH time decreeing what men and women COULD do meant that men and women kept blurring those lines, which for that time and place were FAR more clear than they are now. (I am an odd. In the world I grew up in, which retains a lot of medieval characteristics, I not only was pulled away from groups of boys I was playing with and told that girls play with girls and boys with boys (sounds like a motto for a gay bar) but I was also severely suppressed when I was about 8 and developed a fascination with whistling. I was told that women who whistle and men who spin (thread) are both going to hell. This must be a medieval thing, as I have clue zero why whistling should be masculine. In my family’s defense, this might have been an attempt at just getting the horrible noise to stop.
Sarah Hoyt, “Gears and Patterns”, According to Hoyt, 2016-12-16.
October 18, 2018
QotD: Relationships with much younger partners
A contemporary of mine, after a number of marriages, found a girlfriend less than half his age of a transcendent pneumatic beauty who hung on his every word — and dumped her after a couple of months. Why, I asked — she was perfect! “Too many things we didn’t have in common,” he said sadly. Like what? “Well, the Eighties.”
Which brings us to sex. Nicola has just exclaimed with unusual force that she has never slept with a 60-year-old and she’s not planning on starting now. Nobody wants to think about 60-year-olds doing it, least of all 60-year-olds. Another contemporary pointed out that it wasn’t finding the first grey pubic hair on yourself that was the doom-laden shock, it was finding it on the person you were sleeping with.
A.A. Gill, “Life at 60”, Sunday Times, 2014-06-29.
October 17, 2018
QotD: “60 is the new 40”
… over the years I’ve watched people my age go from rarely mentioned as sportsmen and pop stars to more commonly as leading actors and television presenters and now ubiquitously I find myself in the thick of captains of industry, ennobled politicians, retired sportsmen and character actors. You only notice the accumulating years in relation to other people.
Last week an editor breezily mentioned that as I was coming up to a milestone decade would I perhaps like to write something about it? You know, is 60 the new 40? Why do you make those little noises when you get out of a chair? Am I considering getting a shed, or a cruise, or Velcro? And what about sex?
The only people who ask about significant birthdays are younger than you. No 70-year-olds are inquiring about my insights on being 60. Age is the great terra incognita. But then, all the people who tell me to do anything are younger than me now.
And please, can we stop this “60 is the new 40” thing? No one is saying 20 is the new 10. And who wants to be 40 anyway? An insipid, insecure age.
My generation, the postwar baby-boomers, are over the meridian of our vital parabolas. We’ve done our best and our worst, overachieved and underperformed, are either preparing to bask on the sun loungers of our success or suck our bruised fingers in the waiting rooms of failure. So 60 is both a personal summit from which to look back, breathing heavily, hands on my knees, and a generational one.
A.A. Gill, “Life at 60”, Sunday Times, 2014-06-29.
