Do you remember Tiananmen Square?

It’s difficult to believe that it was over two decades ago, but today, June 4th, indeed marks the twenty-four year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China.

This was when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students who sought to bring about more freedom.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) ended these protests by force — which, really, is the only way governments can ever resolve disputes of this sort, since government by definition is an agency of force.

When it was all over, the People’s Republic of China began arresting its people on a widespread scale.

They also went to great lengths to suppress protesters and other people of China who were supportive of the protesters’ cause.

The People’s Republic of China banned the foreign press and controlled all later coverage of the event.

Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government (Andrew Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers).

The protesters — among whom were advocates of laissez-faire as well as disillusioned communists and Trotskyites and many other groups besides — were united only in their hatred of that oppressive regime. The Tiananmen Square protest was a protest against authoritarianism.

It actually began some seven weeks before, on April 15th, 1989, after the death of a largely pro-free-market, anti-corruption government official named Hu Yaobang. Many Chinese people wanted to mourn his death because they regarded him as something of a hero. By the eve of Hu’s funeral, a million people had gathered in Tiananmen Square.

In fact, many large-scale protests sprung up all throughout the cities of China, including Shanghai. These others remained peaceful, however.

It is not known exactly how many people died altogether in Tiananmen Square, although at one time the Chinese Red Cross gave a figure of 2,600, which they later denied.

During those seven weeks, many of these protesters were openly discussing a principle that we almost never hear discussed even in this country — though it was this country’s foundational principle — a principle that is so profound and so complex that only a small minority of people today grasp its awesome logic. That principle is the principle of individual rights.

It was, incidentally, this same communistic Chinese government that American pseudo-intellectuals, like Norman Mailer, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky, have described as (quoting Chomsky’s own words) “a relatively livable and just society,” about which “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” Furthermore says Chomsky:

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”

Among the people who died in the Tiananmen Square massacre was a young girl, a student, who worked as a pastry chef in a Dim Sum cafe on the Yangtze. She was the daughter of an engineer. In a country that did not (and does not) permit freedom, she came to understand the principle of individual rights and the inseparable link that exists between property and person — which is to say, economics and politics, or body and brain, all of which amount to the same thing. And that, reader, is no small thing.

Lesson: always take the Fifth.

A labor union representing roofers is reversing course and calling for repeal of the federal health law, citing concerns the law will raise its cost for insuring members.

Organized labor was instrumental in getting the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, but more recently has voiced concerns that the law could lead members to lose their existing health plans. The United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers is believed to be the first union to initially support the law and later call for its repeal.

The Union’s statement, which can be found here, in part reads:

United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers International President Kinsey M. Robinson issued the following statement today calling for a repeal or complete reform of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA):

“Our Union and its members have supported President Obama and his Administration for both of his terms in office.

But regrettably, our concerns over certain provisions in the ACA have not been addressed, or in some instances, totally ignored. In the rush to achieve its passage, many of the Act’s provisions were not fully conceived, resulting in unintended consequences that are inconsistent with the promise that those who were satisfied with their employer sponsored coverage could keep it.

In a perverse sort of way, it’s funny that people actually believed Barack Obama when he said “If you like your insurance plan, you can keep your insurance plan.”

Now the lie comes home to roost.

Unions, you got what your deserved.

A reader writes:

Dear Sir: Why do rabbits and eggs represent Easter, which also celebrates the resurrection of Christ?

– Peter

Dear Peter: Easter primarily represents the advent of springtime, just as Christ’s resurrection does. The Old-English word Eastre derives from an Anglo-Saxon Pagan goddess named Eostre, about whom very little is known. What we do know about her comes to us from the Benedictine monk Bede (672-735 A.D.), also sometimes referred to as the Father of English History.

In Bede’s On the Reckoning of Time, he mentions a goddess named Eostre, and he tells us that the Anglo-Saxons had at one time worshiped this goddess during the spring equinox.

Apart from Bede, no other reference to Eostre exists. Indeed, even in Bede’s time, she had long since faded away. The fact, however, that Eostre was worshiped during the spring equinox does suggest something significant.

Quoting the genius priest-poet Gerard Hopkins:

What is spring?
Growth in everything.

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle-blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod and sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathizing
With that world of good,
Nature’s motherhood.

(Gerard Manly Hopkins, “May Magnificat”)

As you of all people would know, Peter, rabbits and hares are notorious breeders, and no doubt you’re familiar with the saying “to fuck like bunnies.” This sedate and venerable expression comes about because lagomorphs mature sexually at very young ages. They are also capable of superfetation, which means they can conceive a second time while still pregnant, and thus they are able to give birth to two litters. This actually happens many times throughout the year, although spring seems to make these little girls and guys particularly crazy. The females are extraordinarily fertile, and that is eggsactly why they symbolize springtime.

Rabbits and hares represent breeding and birth. Eggs also have obvious fertility-birth-and-blood connotations, and for this reason, they have represented fertility and spring since the dawn of humankind.

Do rabbits produce eggs? No, they do not. The good lady Eostre did, however, once putatively save a freezing bird at the end of winter, by turning this bird into a hare, which hare because it had once been a bird could then lay eggs, whereas I can only suck them, as you can see.

Dying Easter eggs and the source of this eggsellent tradition is a mystery, though the Ancient Greeks did color eggs green (to symbolize new grass) and red (to symbolize blood).

Birth. Blood. Death. Winter. Resurrection. Rebirth. Spring. Life.

“There is nothing greater than life,” said Voltaire.

That is what Easter is about.

The early Christians understood this. So they kept many of the Pagan symbols of spring; they absorbed them, as it were, in part, perhaps, because these symbols are so primal and so beautiful.

It is, after all, a beautiful world we live in.

Happy Easter, Peter.

Best first sentence for a novel about a lovely librarian who secretly burns the books she loves because she wants no one else to read them.

You got the stuff?

Submit your work here:

http://journalpulp.com/2013/03/21/best-first-sentence-2/

Whiskey — or whisky, if you prefer — is a distilled spirit that’s usually made from corn, rye, barley, wheat, or, very often, a cross combination of some or all those.

Whiskey is almost always aged in wooden casks which almost always consist of charred white oak.

The word “whiskey” is an anglicized version of the Gaelic uisce beatha (in Scottish Gaelic: uisge beatha) which means “living water,” or “water of life.”

Irish whiskey, Scottish whiskey (i.e. scotch), Canadian whiskey, and American whiskey (i.e. bourbon) are by far the most popular whiskeys in the world. But these days virtually every country produces some sort of whiskey.

In bartending, whiskey is the new vodka. It has never been more popular.

So I made the following:

Well, don’t watch this:





(Hat tip Doug Powers via Michelle Malkin)

“The time has come, America, to step up and ban these weapons,” Feinstein said. “The other very important part of this bill is to ban large capacity ammunition feeding devices — those that hold more than 10 rounds. We have federal regulations and state laws that prohibit hunting ducks with more than three rounds. And yet it’s legal to hunt humans with 15-round, 30-round, even 150-round magazines. Limiting magazine capacity is critical, because it is when a criminal, a drug dealer, a deranged individual has to pause to change magazines and reload that, the police or brave bystanders have the opportunity to take that individual down.” — Senator Dianne Feinstein, March 10, 2013

Draw your own conclusions.

My name is Kevin. I’m Kevin Mathew Haas.
My last name does not rhyme with moss.
It does not rhyme with floss.
To say so makes me cross.
Many regard me as the motherfucking boss.
I enjoy a little of the sauce.
In fact, my last name — Haas —
rhymes with gauze.
(This should give you pause.)
It also rhymes with laws.
I, Kevin Mathew Haas,
liked The Wizard of Oz
but did not particularly care for Jaws,
which I saw when I was seven.
My name is Kevin.


Editors note: the preceding was a poem I wrote about my co-worker Kevin — the Bob Ross of bartending, the Meatloaf of mixology, the William Shakespeare of sauce-slinging, the Kenny Chesney of the craft cocktail.

The man named Valentinus (which comes from the Latin valens, meaning “powerful, brave, valiant”) was a martyred Christian of ancient Rome, about whom virtually nothing is known.

His name does not appear in the earliest redaction of Christian martyrs (354 AD), and it was Pope Gelasius who first included Valentinus — or Saint Valentine, as Pope Gelasius canonized him — “among those whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God.”

The origins of the Feast of Saint Valentine’s Day are equally murky, and it’s not actually known for certain if the feast of that day is meant to celebrate one saint or several saints with that same name.

The link between Valentine’s Day and romantic-sexual love probably came about in a time now called the High Middle Ages (HMA), when courtly love and all its dog-and-pony-show rituals propagated like bunny rabbits.

The English word love is sourced in the Old High German (OHG) luba and the Gothic lub? and the Latin lub?re — all (like the archaic lief) meaning “pleasing,” “treasured,” “desirous,” “dear.” Even now, the German word liebling, directly related to lief, essentially means that same thing: “dear.”

The word agape, on the other hand, which is the Greek word from which charite ultimately derives, is in Latin caritas, and means “To esteem highly.”

Caritas never really denoted what charity denotes today: namely, giving things away for free.

According to Oxford, caritas meant “Dearness, fondness, affection; love founded upon esteem.”

It was specifically contrasted with amor, a word with a distinctly physical connotation. Oxford goes on to define the original meaning of charite (as opposed to caritas) as “Benignity of disposition expressing itself in Christ-like conduct.”

The word caritas quickly passed out of the monasteries and the churches, where Latin was so frequently used, and into the then more common usage: cheritet or cherite — both deriving from the word cher, meaning “dear,” “dear one,” or “to hold dear.”

Indeed, also to this very day, the word “cherish” means exactly that.

In addition to all this, there was for the same Greek word another Latin word used in those first biblical translations: dilectio.

Like caritas, the word dilectio also meant “To esteem highly.”

Etymologically, this is all significant because later biblical translations, starting in the 16th century, began rendering dilectio as love, and caritas as charity, so that some of the very earliest bibles were already using “love” and “charity” interchangeably, just as the first translators had used caritas and dilectio interchangeably.

Gradually, as the decades and centuries passed and more and more translations were produced, the word love was increasingly substituted for the word charity, until by 1881, the Revised Edition of the King James had completely replaced charity with love. That of course is how it stands today.

Love, in other words, made caritas and dilectio into one.

Remember, though, that these words, as well as the Greek word agape from which they originated, all meant “Dearness, fondness, affection; to esteem highly.”

(It is perhaps worth noting also that decades before the King James translation, there was the William Tyndale New Testament, and Tyndale chose the word love instead of charite.)

From a New Testament perspective, it is, I think, beyond dispute that love is the most important theme that the gospels and the epistles propound. In fact, I believe that if you were to distill the entire New Testament down to its fundamental principle, the one thing that would remain is love. No thinking person, atheist or not, can in my opinion reasonably deny that.

And yet (as I wrote, last Valentine’s Day) if that’s the case, why are we still left feeling slightly unsatisfied about what, precisely, it all means?

Thomas Aquinas, as he so often does, offers some help:

Natural things desire what is in conformity to their nature… Now, in every appetite or desire, love is the principle of the movement that tends toward the end which is loved. In natural appetite the principle of such movement is the connaturality that exists between the one who desires and the end to which he tends. We might call it a natural love.

Natural love is nothing more than the fundamental inclination which is stamped upon every being by the Author of nature.

Thomas Aquinas, like his teacher Aristotle, thought that the highest love was friendship. Both, however, believed that friendship was just a precursor to understanding the love that is, in Aquinas’s words, caritas (charity). One of the first questions Aquinas poses in his tract on charity is whether charity equals friendship. He answers this way:

According to Aristotle (Ethics VIII, 4) not all love has the character of friendship, but only that love which goes with wishing well, namely when we so love another as to will what is good for him. For if we do not will what is good to the things we love but rather, we will their good for ourselves, as we are said to love wine, a horse or the like, then that is not love of friendship but a love of desire. For it would be foolish to say that someone has friendship with wine or a horse.

But benevolence alone does not suffice to constitute friendship; it also requires a certain mutual loving, because a friend is friendly to his friend. But such mutual benevolence is based on something shared in common.

Here are two different translation of what is probably the most famous codification of love:

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth (1 Corinthians 13:4, King James).

And:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails (1 Corinthians, New International ).

Yet in both instances this strikes me not so much as a definition but more as a manifestation — a by-product, a side-effect.

A side-effect of what?

Of happiness, and the verdict in your eyes when you look up at me.

CUPID by Spinerette:

Former Romney adviser Avik Roy now advises conservatives “to accept the defeat of the movement to repeal Obamacare.” Conservatives should instead shift their energies to “the most desired conservative outcome of all: a fiscally sustainable, fully reformed set of health-care entitlements.”

National Review, that conservative icon that “stands athwart history, yelling Stop,” seems a strange venue for encouraging conservatives to accept defeat. Roy also has a curious understanding of conservatism’s goals, which as I recall have more to do with protecting freedom than with administering the entitlement state. But when Roy likened ongoing Obamacare resistance to Teruo Nakamura, “the last known holdout from the Imperial Japanese Army, [who] finally surrendered” on a Pacific island some 30 years after his team lost World War II, I nearly spat out my sushi.

Perhaps I can bring my friend around to the view held by most Obamacare opponents:This thing is still vulnerable. And even if we fail to stop it, trying to stop it will do more to protect liberty and improve social welfare than a strategy of accepting, legitimizing, and “redeeming” it.

After three years, Obamacare remains unpopular. Both the raw numbers and the intensity favor its opponents. Last month, for the first time ever, Gallup found that a majority of Americans oppose a government guarantee of health insurance for all. The ongoing resistance to Obamacare is a grassroots phenomenon. It has probably intensified since the election, as many disappointed voters (and non-voters) have sought an outlet for their frustrations.

Resistance will grow later this year as a result of “sticker shock” at Obamacare’s “startling rate increases” of 30 to 40 percent in the individual market and 100 percent (!) for young adults.

Officials in nearly half the states have joined the resistance thus far, by declining to establish the health-insurance “exchanges” essential to the law and/or to implement its costly Medicaid expansion. If states hold the line, then insurers, hospitals, and such — who were counting on those subsidies to offset Obamacare’s taxes and Medicare cuts — will join the chorus demanding that Congress reopen the issue.

The Obama administration probably won’t be able to get exchanges up and running by October in those two dozen states. A Xerox official who makes money implementing those exchanges for states said of the logistical task HHS faces, “These are systems that typically take two or three years to build. The last time I looked at the calendar, that’s not what we’re working with.”

Obamacare still faces a barrage of lawsuits. Those challenging the contraceptives mandate and the Independent Payment Advisory Board won’t kill the law. But they might improve it. Either way, they will keep its negatives high. The Pacific Legal Foundation’s challenge to the individual mandate could take down the entire statute. Kaiser Health News says Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt’s lawsuit is “by far the broadest and potentially most damaging of the legal challenges” related to Obamacare, and “even some health law supporters concede [it] seems correct as a literal reading of the most relevant provisions.” If Oklahoma prevails, “the whole structure [of] the health care reform law starts to fall apart.” Look how panicked the law’s supporters are. Tell me again why now is the time to “accept defeat”?

Continuing to insist on repeal can also help to avoid the looming debt crisis. Congress desperately needs to cut spending. The easiest stuff to cut is (a) unpopular spending that (b) hasn’t started yet and therefore isn’t protected by the kind of organized constituencies that protect existing spending. Obamacare fits both criteria. Since the administration won’t be able to implement it on time anyway, Congress should enact a two-year delay of its new entitlement spending. That would be a huge victory and reduce federal deficits by $160 billion. Opponents are more likely to get that delay if they keep demanding full repeal.

Following Roy’s advice would prevent opponents from capitalizing on any of these opportunities. Obamacare’s entitlement spending will begin flowing in 2014, and we will never stop it.

Fortunately, as I travel the country speaking about this law, I find that Obamacare opponents are solidly in the Frederick Douglass camp: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

(Link)

(Lord Byron in Turkish Garb)

“A man of genius whose heart is perverted,” William Wordsworth called Lord Bryon.

“The most vulgar-minded genius that ever produced a great effect in literature,” George Eliot called Lord Byron.

“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” Caroline Lamb said of Lord Byron.

“The greatest poetic genius of our century,” Goethe called Lord Byron.

(“The greatest poetic genius of our century,” Lord Byron called Goethe.)

Byron was nine-years-old when he was introduced to sex by his nurse, one May Gray.

(Goethe did not go to bed with a woman until he was forty.)

Quoth Lord Byron’s friend, the fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, in a letter from Venice:

The most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted, countesses smell so strongly of garlic, that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them. Well, Lord Byron is familiar with the lowest sorts of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets.

“Wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him,” reads a line from Lord Byron’s journal, regarding Sir Walter Scot.

The Irish actor Gabriel Byrne once played Lord Byron in a bad B movie called Gothic:

“As long as I retain my feeling and my passion for Nature, I can partly soften or subdue my other passions and resist or endure those of others,” wrote Lord Byron.

“Lord Byron — the 6th Baron Byron — club-footed and handsome, whose full name was George Gordon Noel Byron, was as much a genius of personality as he was of poetry. He was only thirty-six when he died, yet he had already grown overweight and flaccid, with thinning hair and abominable teeth. Nonetheless, every second town in Greece would name a public square after him.”

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
It’s strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this –
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.

Wrote Byron in Don Juan.

Lord Byron, one of the pulpiest of them all, 1788 – 1824, RIP.

James M. Buchanan, economist and Nobel Prize winner, died Wednesday, January 9th, 2013. He was 93. He was also among the most important economists of the 20th century:

“A founder and profound contributor to the discipline of public choice, the branch of economics that examines how governments actually make policies. Prior to his work, many economists focused on market failures, assuming that government actions would bring efficiency. Buchanan argued that self-interested individuals decided both private and public matters. Government failure was a likely outcome in response to market problems. After Buchanan, economists could not blithely assume that government had a solution for every problem on the public agenda.”

(Source)

James Buchanan, a brilliant polemicist, was the perfect antidote to the overwhelming trend of Keynesian economics that pervade world culture, but which are destined to fail. The following is a brief but irrefutable critique of central planning — a critique Buchanan wrote in 1982 and which Don Boudreaux described as “Word for word, the most insightful thing I’ve ever read”:

James M. Buchanan, “Order Defined in the Process of its Emergence”*

*A note stimulated by reading Norman Barry, “The Tradition of Spontaneous Order,” Literature of Liberty, V (Summer 1982), 7-58.

Norman Barry states, at one point in his essay, that the patterns of spontaneous order “appear to be a product of some omniscient designing mind” (p. 8). Almost everyone who has tried to explain the central principle of elementary economics has, at one time or another, made some similar statement. In making such statements, however, even the proponents-advocates of spontaneous order may have, inadvertently, “given the game away,” and, at the same time, made their didactic task more difficult.

I want to argue that the “order” of the market emerges only from the process of voluntary exchange among the participating individuals. The “order” is, itself, defined as the outcome of the process that generates it. The “it,” the allocation-distribution result, does not, and cannot, exist independently of the trading process. Absent this process, there is and can be no “order.”

What, then, does Barry mean (and others who make similar statements), when the order generated by market interaction is made comparable to that order which might emerge from an omniscient, designing single mind? If pushed on this question, economists would say that if the designer could somehow know the utility functions of all participants, along with the constraints, such a mind could, by fiat, duplicate precisely the results that would emerge from the process of market adjustment. By implication, individuals are presumed to carry around with them fully determined utility functions, and, in the market, they act always to maximize utilities subject to the constraints they confront. As I have noted elsewhere, however, in this presumed setting, there is no genuine choice behavior on the part of anyone. In this model of market process, the relative efficiency of institutional arrangements allowing for spontaneous adjustment stems solely from the informational aspects.

This emphasis is misleading. Individuals do not act so as to maximize utilities described in independently existing functions. They confront genuine choices, and the sequence of decisions taken may be conceptualized, ex post (after the choices), in terms of “as if” functions that are maximized. But these “as if” functions are, themselves, generated in the choosing process, not separately from such process. If viewed in this perspective, there is no means by which even the most idealized omniscient designer could duplicate the results of voluntary interchange. The potential participants do not know until they enter the process what their own choices will be. From this it follows that it is logically impossible for an omniscient designer to know, unless, of course, we are to preclude individual freedom of will.

The point I seek to make in this note is at the same time simple and subtle. It reduces to the distinction between end-state and process criteria, between consequentialist and nonconsequentialist, teleological and deontological principles. Although they may not agree with my argument, philosophers should recognize and understand the distinction more readily than economists. In economics, even among many of those who remain strong advocates of market and market-like organization, the “efficiency” that such market arrangements produce is independently conceptualized. Market arrangements then become “means,” which may or may not be relatively best. Until and unless this teleological element is fully exorcised from basic economic theory, economists are likely to remain confused and their discourse confusing.

James M. Buchanan — 1919 – 2013 — RIP.

The Thin White Duke

David Bowie is one of my absolute favorite musicians of all-time. Today he turned 66-years-old, and in honor of the occasion, after a full decade of silence, he released a new single called “Where Are We Now?”

Happy Birthday, David Bowie!

Syncretism: a term that means the combining or reconciling of opposing practices and principles. It’s most commonly used in a religious or philosophical context, and as with Easter, Christmas too is syncretic in its origins: a pagan celebration whose provenance long predates Christ’s birth but which eventually made its way into the Christian mainstream.

As a matter of fact, it wasn’t until approximately 300 years after the death of Christ that the Roman church began observing Christmas, and it wasn’t until the 5th century AD that the church officially mandated that Christmas be observed by Christians throughout the world “as a festival honoring the birth of Jesus Christ” (though, let it be noted, Christ was not born in winter but most likely fall).

Not all Christians have agreed with this official Christmas mandate: in 1659, for instance, the Puritans of New England, about whom I’ve written before, banned Christmas by law throughout the Massachusetts Bay Colony, calling it “heathen, papist idolatry,” and even went so far as to deem its observance a crime punishable by imprisonment. It was until 1856 that in Boston people stopped working on Christmas.

What follows are some fascinating facts about the long and little-known history of Christmas.

From The Encyclopedia Americana:

Christmas was not observed in the first centuries of the Christian church, since the Christian usage in general was to celebrate the death of remarkable persons rather than their birth…a feast was established in memory of this event [Christ's birth] in the 4th century. In the 5th century the Western church ordered the feast to be celebrated on the day of the Mithraic rites of the birth of the sun and at the close of the Saturnalia, as no certain knowledge of the day of Christ’s birth existed.

And from the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia:

Christmas was not among the earliest festivals of the Church. The first evidence of the feast is from Egypt.

From The Buffalo News, November 22, 1984:

The earliest reference to Christmas being marked on Dec. 25 comes from the second century after Jesus’ birth. It is considered likely the first Christmas celebrations were in reaction to the Roman Saturnalia, a harvest festival that marked the winter solstice–the return of the sun–and honored Saturn, the god of sowing. Saturnalia was a rowdy time, much opposed by the more austere leaders among the still-minority Christian sect. Christmas developed, one scholar says, as a means of replacing worship of the sun with worship of the Son. By 529 A.D., after Christianity had become the official state religion of the Roman Empire, Emperor Justinian made Christmas a civic holiday. The celebration of Christmas reached its peak–some would say its worst moments–in the medieval period when it became a time for conspicuous consumption and unequaled revelry.

And here’s a passage from the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge:

How much the date of the festival depended upon the pagan Brumalia (December 25) following the Saturnalia (Dec. 17-24), and celebrating the shortest day of the year and the ‘new sun’…cannot be accurately determined. The pagan Saturnalia and Brumalia were too deeply entrenched in popular custom to be set aside by Christian influence…The pagan festival with its riot and merry-making was so popular that Christians were glad of an excuse to continue its celebration with little change in spirit and in manner. Christian preachers of the West and the Near East protested against the unseemly frivolity with which Christ’s birthday was celebrated, while Christians of Mesopotamia accused their Western brethren of idolatry and sun worship for adopting as Christian this pagan festival.

Finally, from the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Christmas was not among the earliest festivals of the church…. Certain Latins, as early as 354, may have transferred the birthday from January 6th to December 25, which was then a Mithraic feast…or birthday of the unconquered SUN…The Syrians and Armenians, who clung to January 6th, accused the Romans of sun worship and idolatry, contending…that the feast of December 25th, had been invented by disciples of Cerinthus.

The Democrat and Chronicle, of Rochester, New York, in December 1984 wrote:

The Roman festival of Saturnalia, Dec. 17-24, moved citizens to decorate their homes with greens and lights and give gifts to children and the poor. The Dec. 25 festival of natalis solis invicti, the birth of the unconquered sun, was decreed by the emperor Aurelian in A.D. 274 as a Winter Solstice celebration, and sometime (later)…was Christianized as a date to celebrate the birth of the Son of Light.

And in December of 1989, Dr. William Gutsch, chairman of the American Museum of Natural History, said, in the Westchester, New York, newspaper:

The early Romans were not celebrating Christmas but rather a pagan feast called the Saturnalia. It occurred each year around the beginning of winter, or the winter solstice. This was the time when the sun had taken its lowest path across the sky and the days were beginning to lengthen, thus assuring another season of growth.

If many of the trappings of the Saturnalia, however, seem to parallel what so many of us do today, we can see where we borrowed…our holiday traditions. And indeed, it has been suggested that while Christ was most likely not born in late December, the early Christians — then still an outlawed sect — moved Christmas to the time of the Saturnalia to draw as little attention as possible to themselves while they celebrated their own holiday.

Lastly, from a Christian who does not like Christmas, and from whom many of these quotes have been culled:

The Saturnalia, of course, celebrated Saturn–the fire god. Saturn was the god of sowing (planting) because heat from the sun was required to allow for planting and growth of crops. He was also worshipped [sic] in this dead-of-winter festival so that he would come back (he was the “sun”) and warm the earth again so that spring planting could occur.

In an Easter post I once wrote, I quoted the genius priest-poet Gerard Hopkins, in a poem he wrote about spring. And in response to the passage just cited above, it seems relevant to recall those same words that Hopkins’s wrote:

What is spring?
Growth in everything.

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle-blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod and sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathizing
With that world of good,
Nature’s motherhood.

(Gerard Manly Hopkins, “May Magnificat”)

Winter. Death. Rebirth. The lengthening days. Life.

That, in part, is what Christmas represents.

But it also represents something more, something equally beautiful, and something much wider than the laws laid down by any one particular custom or creed: it represents peace on earth and good will towards women and men.

The short answer is No, though you’d never guess it by listening to the mainstream media.

Jesse Walker has written a good article on the subject:

As the AP pointed out this weekend:

[T]hose who study mass shootings say they are not becoming more common.

“There is no pattern, there is no increase,” says criminologist James Allen Fox of Boston’s Northeastern University, who has been studying the subject since the 1980s, spurred by a rash of mass shootings in post offices.

The random mass shootings that get the most media attention are the rarest, Fox says. Most people who die of bullet wounds knew the identity of their killer….

Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has written a history of mass murders in America, said that while mass shootings rose between the 1960s and the 1990s, they actually dropped in the 2000s. And mass killings actually reached their peak in 1929, according to his data. He estimates that there were 32 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s and 26 in the first decade of the century.

Read the full article here.

This was written by the late Ted Hughes, most famous, I think, for being the husband of Sylvia Plath:

The pig lay on a barrow dead.
It weighed, they said, as much as three men.
Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes.
Its trotters stuck straight out.

Such weight and thick pink bulk
Set in death seemed not just dead.
It was less than lifeless, further off.
It was like a sack of wheat.

I thumped it without feeling remorse.
One feels guilty insulting the dead,
Walking on graves. But this pig
Did not seem able to accuse.

It was too dead. Just so much
A poundage of lard and pork.
Its last dignity had entirely gone.
It was not a figure of fun.

Too dead now to pity.
To remember its life, din, stronghold
Of earthly pleasure as it had been,
Seemed a false effort, and off the point.

Too deadly factual. Its weight
Oppressed me—how could it be moved?
And the trouble of cutting it up!
The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic.

Once I ran at a fair in the noise
To catch a greased piglet
That was faster and nimbler than a cat,
Its squeal was the rending of metal.

Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like ovens.
Their bite is worse than a horse’s—
They chop a half-moon clean out.
They eat cinders, dead cats.

Distinctions and admirations such
As this one was long finished with.
I stared at it a long time. They were going to scald it,
Scald it and scour it like a doorstep.

In this case, it was the left-wing government.

Here is a small sampling of the things that Barack Obama supporters backed — please own it — in backing Barack Obama:

Mohamed Morsi — first Islamist president in Egypt’s history and a member the Muslim Brotherhood which openly advocates violence against women much like the unspeakable deed we see in this photo — is supported and sanctioned by Barack Obama and his administration.

Barack Obama recently welcomed the election of the first Islamist president in Egypt’s history.

This is a man who during his campaign, a campaign the Obama administration openly supported, said: “The Koran is our Constitution, the prophet is our leader, jihad is our path, and death in the name of allah is our goal.”

This same man, Mohamed Morsi, belongs to an organization called the Muslim Brotherhood, which among other things explicitly pledges in its charter to “infiltrate western society and destroy it from within.”

This same man, to whom Barack Obama sent $450 million taxpayer dollars, also supports forced female circumcision, genital mutilation, and the absolute rejection of women’s rights.

If, therefore, you believe, as I do, in women’s rights, gay rights, and the inalienable rights of all human beings regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, color, class, or creed, please note that if you backed Barack Obama, you backed a man who backs a man who sanctions this. Because when the Obama administration says, as it recently did: “We look forward to working with President-elect Mohamed Morsi, and the government he forms” — they were not, I assure you, kidding (though in reality it sounds like a very sick joke indeed).

The bureaucratic monstrosity known as the Internal Revenue Service — the IRS — will now control the majority of your healthcare decisions, thanks to ObamaCare. The private, one-on-one relationship between you and your doctor will be effectively abolished.

Obama not only extended but expanded the so-called Patriot Act, which among liberals George Bush was properly vilified for, and which supports among other things warrentless wire-taps, invasive surveillance, and spying on American citizens.

Obama then went on to signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which among other things grants him the power to indefinitely detain and arrest any American citizen any time he wants, under his discretion. Obama supporters (unwittingly) called Barack “a psychopath” for these very policies, although when they realized it was in fact Barack who signed these policies, everything became inexplicably okay:

Instead of “cutting the deficit in half,” as he pledged on February 23, 2009, Barack Obama has amassed the greatest debt this country has ever known, and which will turn a once economically great nation on its economic head.

When pot smokers and recreational drug-users voted for Barack Obama because, during his initial campaign for President, he promised “a compassionate drug policy,” they may not have realized that in actuality Obama requested $25.6 billion for drug control by 2013. That is the highest yearly total ever by an American president. More here on this absolutely pointless and profligate life-destroying war-on-drugs:

And let us not, of course, forget the so-called stimulus package which Barack Obama rammed through before anyone had even read the bill — a very partial listing of which expenditures runs something like this:

Department of Agriculture – Office of Inspector General $22,500,000
Department of Commerce – Office of Inspector General $10,000,000
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – Office of Inspector General $6,000,000
Department of Justice – Office of Inspector General $2,000,000
NASA – Office of Inspector General $2,000,000
Defense Department – Office of Inspector General $15,000,000
Department of Energy – Office of Inspector General $15,000,000
Department of the Treasury – Inspector General for Tax Administration $7,000,000
General Services Administration – Office of Inspector General $7,000,000
Recovery Act Accountability and Transparency Board $84,000,000
Small Business Administration – Office of Inspector General $10,000,000
Department of Homeland Security – Office of Inspector General $5,000,000
Bureau of Indian Affairs – Office of Inspector General $15,000,000
Environmental Protection Agency – Office of Inspector General $20,000,000
Department of Labor – Office of Inspector General $6,000,000
Department of Health and Human Services – Office of Inspector General related to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology $17,000,000
Department of Education – Office of Inspector General $14,000,000
Corporation for National and Community Service – Office of Inspector General $1,000,000
Social Security Administration – Office of Inspector General $2,000,000
Government Accountability Office salaries and expenses $25,000,000
Veterans Affairs – Office of Inspector General $1,000,000
State Department – Office of Inspector General $2,000,000
Department of Transportation – Office of Inspector General $20,000,000
Department of Housing and Urban Development – Office of Inspector General $15,000,000
Aid to People Affected by Economic Downturn $36,910,807,000
Rural Housing Service insurance fund program account – direct loans and unsubsidized guaranteed loans $11,672,000,000
Rural community facilities program account $130,000,000
Special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children (WIC) $500,000,000
School lunch programs for schools in which at least 50% of students are eligible for free or reduced price meals $100,000,000
Food bank commodity assistance program $150,000,000
Temporary increase in benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) $19,900,000,000
Food distribution program on Indian reservations $5,000,000
Agricultural disaster assistance transition – Federal Crop Insurance Act
Farm operating loans $173,367,000
Direct farm operating loans $20,440,000
IRS health insurance tax credit administration $80,000,000
Emergency food and shelter $100,000,000
Bureau of Indian Affairs job training and housing improvement programs $40,000,000
Indian guaranteed loan program $10,000,000
Community service employment for older Americans $120,000,000
Extra funding for state unemployment insurance $150,000,000
State re-employment services for the jobless $250,000,000
Child care assistance for low-income families $1,651,227,000
Child care assistance for low-income families through state programs $255,186,000
Child care assistance for low-income families to improve infant and toddler care $93,587,000
Community Service Block Grant Program $1,000,000,000
Social Security Act funding 50,000,000
Social Security Administration processing of disability and retirement workloads $460,000,000
Aid to State and Local Governments $58,355,000,000
State administrative expenses to carry out increase in food stamp program $295,000,000
Economic development assistance programs $150,000,000
Violence against women prevention and prosecution programs $225,000,000
Office of Justice Programs state and local law enforcement assistance (Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grants) $2,000,000,000
State and local law enforcement assistance grants to improve criminal justice systems, assist crime victims and mentor youth $225,000,000
Southern border and high-intensity drug trafficking areas $30,000,000
ATF Project Gunrunner $10,000,000
State and local law enforcement assistance to Indian tribes $225,000,000
Crime victim assistance $100,000,000
Rural drug crime program $125,000,000
Internet crimes against children initiatives $50,000,000
Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grants $1,000,000,000
Justice Department salaries and expenses for administration of police grant programs $10,000,000
Community Development Financial Institutions Fund for financial assistance, training and outreach to Native American, Hawaiian and Alaskan native communities $100,000,000
Local and state fire station upgrades and construction $210,000,000
Disaster assistance direct loans may exceed $5,000,000 and may be equal to not more than 50% of local government annual budget if the government lost 25% or more in tax revenues
State Fiscal Stabilization Fund to avoid cutbacks and layoffs (82% must be used for education while 18% may be used for public safety and other government services. The latter part may be used for repairs and modernization of K-12 schools and college and university buildings.) $53,600,000,000
Business $870,000,000
Rural Business – Cooperative Service: rural business program account $150,000,000
Small Business Administration salaries and expenses, microloan program and improvements to technology systems $69,000,000
Surety bond guarantees revolving fund $15,000,000
Small business loans $636,000,000
Education $48,420,000,000
State grants for adult job training $500,000,000
State grants for youth job training and summer employment opportunities $1,200,000,000
Dislocated worker job training $1,250,000,000
YouthBuild program for high school dropouts who re-enroll in other schools $50,000,000
Job training in emerging industries $250,000,000
Job training in the renewable energy field $500,000,000
Head Start programs $1,000,000,000
Early Head Start program expansion $1,100,000,000
Education for the disadvantaged – elementary and secondary education 10,000,000,000
Education for the disadvantaged – school improvement grants $3,000,000,000
Education impact aid $100,000,000
School improvement programs $650,000,000
Innovation and improvement of elementary and secondary schools $200,000,000
Special education funding under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act $12,200,000,000
Pell grants for higher education $15,840,000,000
Institute of Education data systems $245,000,000
Institute of Education state data coordinators $5,000,000
Dislocated worker assistance national reserve $200,000,000
School improvement grants awarded based on the number of homeless students identified in a state $70,000,000
Student aid administrative costs $60,000,000
Energy $41,400,000,000
Energy efficiency and conservation block grants $3,200,000,000
Weatherization Assistance Program (increases maximum income level and maximum assistance) $5,000,000,000
State energy program $3,100,000,000
Advanced batteries manufacturing, including lithium ion batteries, hybrid electrical systems, component manufacturers and software designers $2,000,000,000
Modernize electricity grid $4,400,000,000
Electricity grid worker training $100,000,000
Fossil energy research and development $3,400,000,000
Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund $390,000,000
Department of Energy science programs $1,600,000,000
Advanced Research Projects Agency $400,000,000
Innovative technology loan guarantee program $6,000,000,000
Western Area Power Administration construction and maintenance $10,000,000
Bonneville Power Administration borrowing authority $3,250,000,000
Western Area Power Administration borrowing authority $3,250,000,000
Leading edge biofuel projects $500,000,000
Federal building conversion to “high-performance green buildings” $4,500,000,000
Energy efficiency federal vehicle fleet procurement $300,000,000
Health Care $18,830,000,000
Indian Health Service information technology and telehealth services $85,000,000
Indian health facilities $415,000,000
Grants for public health centers $500,000,000
Construction, renovation, equipment and information technology for health centers $1,500,000,000
National Health Service Corps funding $75,000,000
Addressing health professions workforce shortage $425,000,000
National Institutes of Health grants and contracts to renovate non-federal research facilities $1,000,000,000
National Institute of Health grants and contracts for shared resources and equipment for grantees $300,000,000
National Institutes of Health fund to support scientific research $7,400,000,000
National Institutes of Health Common Fund $800,000,000
National Institutes of Health renovations of high-priority buildings at the Bethesda, Md., campus, and at other locations $500,000,000
Comparative effectiveness research $300,000,000
Comparative effectiveness research by the National Institutes of Health 400,000,000
Comparative effectiveness research by the Department of Health and Human Services $400,000,000
Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology $1,680,000,000
National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s regional or subnational efforts $300,000,000
Department of Commerce health care information enterprise integration activities related to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology $20,000,000
Department of Health and Human Services computer and information technology security $50,000,000
Department of Health and Human Services Prevention and Wellness Fund $1,000,000,000
Prevention and Wellness Fund immunization program $300,000,000
Prevention and Wellness Fund evidence-based clinical and community-based prevention strategies $650,000,000
Prevention and Wellness Fund reduction in incidence of health-care-associated infections $50,000,000
Rehabilitation services and disability research 540,000,000
State grants for rehabilitation services and disability research $18,200,000
Rehabilitation services in independent living centers $87,500,000
Rehabilitation services for older blind individuals $34,300,000
Other $2,147,000,000
Census Bureau programs $1,000,000,000
Digital-to-analog television converter box program $650,000,000
President shall establish arbitration panel under FEMA public assistance program to expedite recovery efforts from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita
Requirement that Department of Homeland Security uniforms be manufactured and sewn together by U.S. fabric and apparel companies
National Endowment for the Arts grants $50,000,000
Department of Labor salaries and expenses $80,000,000
Additional awards to existing AmeriCorps grantees $83,000,000
AmeriCorps program salaries and expenses $5,200,000
AmeriCorps program administrative costs of expansion $800,000
National security trust appropriation $40,000,000
Social Security Administration health information technology research $40,000,000
Filipino World War II veterans compensation $198,000,000
Science and Technology $13,142,000,000
Farm Service Agency salaries and expenses to maintain and modernize the information technology system $50,000,000
Distance learning, telemedicine and broadband program $2,500,000,000
National Telecommunications and Information Administration – broadband technology opportunities program $4,690,000,000
National Institute of Standards and Technology scientific and technical research and services $220,000,000
National Institute of Standards and Technology construction of research facilities $360,000,000
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration operations, research and facilities $230,000,000
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration procurement, acquisition and construction $600,000,000
NASA science $400,000,000
NASA aeronautics $150,000,000
NASA exploration $400,000,000
NASA cross agency support $50,000,000
National Science Foundation research and related activities $2,500,000,000
National Science Foundation education and human resources $100,000,000
National Science Foundation major research equipment and facilities construction $400,000,000
National Science Foundation – Office of Inspector General $2,000,000
Veterans Affairs for hiring and training of claims processors $150,000,000
Veterans Affairs information technology systems $50,000,000
State Department technology security upgrades $252,000,000
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) technology $38,000,000
Transportation and Infrastructure $98,325,000,000
Agriculture buildings and facilities and rental payments $24,000,000
Agricultural Research Service buildings and facilities $176,000,000
Natural Resources Conservation Service watershed and flood prevention programs $290,000,000
Watershed rehabilitation program $50,000,000
Rural Utilities Service water and waste disposal program account $1,380,000,000
Defense Department facilities operation and maintenance, Army $1,474,525,000
Defense Department facilities operation and maintenance, Navy $657,051,000
Defense Department facilities operation and maintenance, Marine Corps $113,865,000
Defense Department facilities operation and maintenance, Air Force $1,095,959,000
Defense Department facilities operation and maintenance, Army Reserve $98,269,000
Defense Department facilities operation and maintenance, Navy $55,083,000
Defense Department facilities operation and maintenance, Marine Corps Reserve $39,909,000
Defense Department facilities operation and maintenance, Air Force Reserve $13,187,000
Defense Department facilities operation and maintenance, Army National Guard $266,304,000
Defense Department facilities operation and maintenance, Air National Guard $25,848,000
Army research development, test and evaluation $75,000,000
Navy research development, test and evaluation $75,000,000
Air Force research development, test and evaluation $75,000,000
Defense-wide research development, test and evaluation $75,000,000
Defense Department medical facilities repair and modernization including energy efficiency $400,000,000
Corps of Engineers investigations $25,000,000
Corps of Engineers construction $2,000,000,000
Corps of Engineers – Mississippi River and tributaries $375,000,000
Corps of Engineers operations and maintenance $2,075,000,000
Corps of Engineers regulatory program $25,000,000
Corps of Engineers formerly utilized sites remedial action program $100,000,000
Bureau of Reclamation water and related resources, including inspection of canals in urbanized areas $900,000,000
Central Utah Project water programs $50,000,000
California Bay-Delta restoration $50,000,000
Non-Defense environmental cleanup $483,000,000
Defense environmental cleanup $5,127,000,000
Federal buildings and courthouses $750,000,000
Border stations and land ports of entry $300,000,000
Department of Homeland Security headquarters consolidation $200,000,000
Customs and Border Protection non-intrusive inspection systems $100,000,000
Customs and Border Protection tactical communications equipment and radios $60,000,000
Border security fencing, infrastructure and technology $100,000,000
Land border ports of entry construction $420,000,000
Immigration and Customs Enforcement tactical communications equipment and radios $20,000,000
Transportation Security Administration checked baggage and checkpoint explosives detection machines $1,000,000,000
Coast Guard shore facilities and aids to navigation facilities $98,000,000
Coast Guard alteration of bridges $142,000,000
FEMA public transportation and railroad security $150,000,000
FEMA port security grants $150,000,000
Bureau of Land Management maintenance and restoration of facilities, trails, lands, abandoned mines and wells $125,000,000
Bureau of Land Management construction of roads, bridges, trails and facilities, including energy efficient retrofits $180,000,000
Wildland fire management and hazardous fuels reduction $15,000,000
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service maintenance and construction on wildlife refuges and fish hatcheries and for habitat restoration $165,000,000
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service roads, bridges and facilities, including energy efficient retrofits $115,000,000
National Park Service facilities and trails $146,000,000
Historically black colleges and universities preservation $15,000,000
National Park Service road construction, cleanup of abandoned mines on parkland and other infrastructure $589,000,000
U.S. Geological Survey facilities and equipment, including stream gages, seismic and volcano monitoring systems and national map activities $140,000,000
Bureau of Indian Affairs construction of roads, schools and detention centers $450,000,000
Superfund site cleanup $600,000,000
Leaking underground storage tank cleanup $200,000,000
Clean water state revolving fund grants $4,000,000,000
Safe drinking water capitalization grants $2,000,000,000
Brownfields projects $100,000,000
Diesel emission reduction grants and loans $300,000,000
Forest Service road, bridge and trail maintenance; watershed restoration; facilities improvement; remediation of abandoned mines; and support costs $650,000,000
Wildfire mitigation $500,000,000
Smithsonian Institution repairs $25,000,000
Construction, renovation and acquisition of Job Corps Centers $250,000,000
Social Security Administration’s National Computer Center replacement $500,000,000
Military construction, Army – child development centers and warrior transition complexes $180,000,000
Military construction, Navy and Marine Corps – child development centers and warrior transition complexes $280,000,000
Military construction, Air Force – child development centers and warrior transition complexes $180,000,000
Military hospital construction and energy conservation investments $1,450,000,000
Military construction, Army National Guard $50,000,000
Military construction, Air National Guard $50,000,000
Family housing construction, Army $34,507,000
Family housing operation and maintenance, Army $3,932,000
Family housing construction, Air Force $80,100,000
Family housing operation and maintenance, Air Force $16,461,000
Temporary expansion of military homeowner assistance program to respond to mortgage foreclosure and credit crisis, including acquisition of property at or near military bases that have been ordered closed. $555,000,000
Veterans Affairs hospital maintenance $1,000,000,000
National Cemetery Administration for monument and memorial repairs $50,000,000
State extended care facilities, such as nursing homes $150,000,000
State Department diplomatic and consular programs for domestic passport and training facilities $90,000,000
International Boundary and Water Commission – Rio Grande levee repairs $220,000,000
Additional capital investments in surface transportation including highways, bridges, and road repairs $1,298,500,000
Administrative costs for additional capital investments in surface transportation $200,000,000
Capital investments in surface transportation grants to be awarded by other administration $1,500,000
Federal Aviation Administration infrastructure $200,000,000
Grants-in-aid for airports $1,100,000,000
Highway infrastructure investment $26,725,000,000
Highway infrastructure investment in Puerto Rico $105,000,000
Highway infrastructure funds distributed by states $60,000,000
Highway infrastructure funds for the Indian Reservation Roads program $550,000,000
Highway infrastructure funds for surface transportation technology training $20,000,000
Highway infrastructure to fund oversight and management of projects $40,000,000
High speed rail capital assistance $8,000,000,000
National Railroad passenger corporation capital grants $850,000,000
National Railroad passenger corporation capital grants for security $450,000,000
Federal Transit Administration capital assistance $6,800,000,000
Public transportation discretionary grants $100,000,000
Fixed guideway infrastructure investment $750,000,000
Capital investment grants $750,000,000
Shipyard grants $100,000,000
Public housing capital improvements $3,000,000,000
Public housing renovations and energy conservation investments $1,000,000,000
Native American housing block grants $510,000,000
Community development funding $1,000,000,000
Emergency assistance for the redevelopment of abandoned and foreclosed homes $2,000,000,000
Additional capital investments in low-income housing tax credit projects $2,250,000,000
Homelessness prevention and re-housing $1,500,000,000
Assistance to owners of properties receiving section 8 assistance $2,000,000,000
Grants and loans for green investment in section 8 properties $250,000,000
Lead hazard reduction $100,000,000

(Source)

So congratulations are in order, I suppose, to all Barack Obama supporters who, even though they don’t have any real understanding of political-economic philosophy, got exactly what they wanted — while the rest of us must deal with the utterly despicable and disastrous consequences.

In hell, said Randal Jarell, Americans tell each other how to make a martini.

A martini — “the elixir of quietude” as E.B. White described it — consists of gin and vermouth. The ingredients are chilled and then strained into a cocktail glass. That, at any rate, is the original martini, though vodka is now, somewhat grudgingly, accepted in the place of gin.

Gin is a strange and fascinating spirit, with a long and diverse history. It is in essence an admixture of grain alcohol and juniper-berry oil and was invented by a 17th Century Dutch medical professor named Francois de Boe Sylvius, who created it to relieve kidney disorders and, he said, “to purify the blood.”

Sylvius called his confection “Genever,” which is the Dutch word for juniper.

Gin is relatively easy and inexpensive to produce, and, in large part for this reason, it took England by complete storm.

Vermouth today — whether sweet or dry — is an entirely different deal from the vermouth that existed back in the days of Francois de Boe Sylvius. Back then, you see, Vermouth was a sweet(ish) digestif made from a myriad of things, such as: orange peels and flowers, juniper and nutmeg, cloves, coriander, cinnamon, marjoram, brandy, white wine, tree bark, and that’s not even the half of it. Today, however, vermouth is mediocre wine, usually white, with herbal-and-spice infusions and alcohol fortification. Sugar is often added.

The true origins of the gin martini are murky, though many stories do exist. Some, for example, say that back in 1912, a legendary New York bartender by the name of Martini invented the drink. Others believe it was first concocted much earlier and in prototypical fashion, back in 1850, in San Francisco, by Professor Jerry Thomas, who purportedly made it for a miner on the way to Martinez, California. The result: the Martinez cocktail, which is a gin-vermouth-maraschino drink, slightly different from the martini, but a venerable drink nevertheless, which still exists to this day. Yet the citizens of Martinez, California say that the martini originated right there, in 1870, and the bartender who first built it was a man named Julio Richelieu.

One thing that’s known for certain: The Martinez cocktail first appeared in The Bartenders Guide in 1887.

The Oxford English Dictionary, a usually impeccable source, tells us — incorrectly — that the martini was invented in 1871, but this was a full twenty years after Jerry Thomas’s drink came into existence.

The English, on the other hand, say that because of its kick, the martini comes from a strong British rifle called a Martini & Henry.

Many New Yorker’s would have us believe that a bartender at the Knickerbocker Hotel — one Martini di Arma di Taggia — invented the drink in 1911 for John David Rockefeller, who, by the way, took his martini with London Dry Gin, dry vermouth, bitters, lemon peel and a single olive.

But, whatever.

About the shape of the glass there is little dispute.
The ritual is really the thing,
holding the stem of the chalice to the light,
somewhat to bless the dying day.
But ever you are ready to begin,
Be extra careful not to bruise the gin.

Thomas Sowell

In his phony-baloney speech from 2007, Barack Obama explicitly claimed that unlike those in New York City following 9/11 and unlike those in Florida following hurricane Andrew, the federal government wasn’t spending enough on the predominantly black victims of Hurricane Katrina because, as then-Senator Obama put it,”they don’t care about [you] as much.”

But as the economist Thomas Sowell points out in his recent column:

Departing from his prepared remarks, [Obama] mentioned the Stafford Act, which requires communities receiving federal disaster relief to contribute 10 percent as much as the federal government does.

If you want to know what community organizers do, this is it — rub people’s emotions raw to hype their resentments. And this was Barack Obama in his old community organizer role, a role that should have warned those who thought that he was someone who would bring us together, when he was all too well practiced in the arts of polarizing us apart.

Why is the date of this speech important? Because, less than two weeks earlier, on May 24, 2007, the United States Senate had in fact voted 80-14 to waive the Stafford Act requirement for New Orleans, as it had waived that requirement for New York and Florida. More federal money was spent rebuilding New Orleans than was spent in New York after 9/11 and in Florida after hurricane Andrew, combined.

And here’s the real kicker:

Unlike Jeremiah Wright’s church, the U.S. Senate keeps a record of who was there on a given day. The Congressional Record for May 24, 2007 shows Senator Barack Obama present that day and voting on the bill that waived the Stafford Act requirement. Moreover, he was one of just 14 Senators who voted against — repeat, AGAINST — the legislation which included the waiver.

When he gave that demagogic speech, in a feigned accent and style, it was world class chutzpah and a rhetorical triumph. He truly deserves the title Phony in Chief.

(Link)