Old Books, New Delights

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Last night on youtube we watched an episode of the old British cop show set on the Isle of Jersey, Bergerac, guest-starring classic comedian Norman Wisdom as a safe-cracker who is also a compulsive liar. Very soon his lies mushroom entirely out of control. This screenplay was brilliant, the performance was brilliant–a totally unexpected gem, which we only saw serendipitously because the first episode we tried to watch wasn’t loading properly.

You can turn up treasure in old books, too. Years ago, for maybe 25 cents, my wife bought a copy of The Third Omnibus of Crime, 800 pages of scary stories edited by Dorothy L. Sayers (1935). It’s been kicking around here for a long time.

The other night I opened it to a story by A.M. Burrage, The Bargain. It took me totally by surprise, and blew me away.

This is a tale of a haunted stamp collection. Huh? Yes, I said a haunted stamp collection. It’s a simple story, and the style is light, almost bantering. It had to be. Otherwise it’d give you nightmares that might not stop. I never heard of A.M. Burrage, but this ghost story of his is worthy of M.R. James himself. Obviously I’m still marveling at it, or I wouldn’t be writing this review.

You can get The Third Omnibus of Crime via amazon.com. It ain’t cheap; but it’d make a heckuva birthday present for someone who loves short stories of crime and creepiness. The Bargain, if you’re only interested in that story, can also be found in Don’t Open This Book, edited by Marvin Kaye, which you can get very cheaply via amazon.

What–you want to know more about this story? Well, how much can I tell you about a short story without ruining it? Suffice it to say that it’s one of a kind. A haunted stamp collection! I’m still shaking my head over it.

Our Immoral and Unrighteous Government

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Message from a reader, yesterday: “I suggest you limit your crusade to morality and righteousness in America, and leave climate change alone…”

Well, I would–only when government gets into the flim-flam business to take the people’s money and their liberties, I’d say that was pretty immoral and unrighteous.

What I don’t see is how morality and righteousness can thrive in any nation where the government uses lies and scare tactics to increase its power and wealth at the people’s expense. I write about Global Warming/Climate Change/Whatevuh because it shows Stalinist wannabes trying to use “science” as an excuse to impose their will.

If we believe in Man-Made Global Warming, and if we believe that government can protect us from it, if we give government vast new powers, we are just asking to be enslaved.

The federal government of the United State has taken unto itself powers far in excess of those enumerated powers assigned to it under the Constitution. Before we trust them with more power, let’s look at what they do with the power that they have already.

They run up huge public debt, much of it for vain and frivolous projects, and endanger the economic well-being of future generations.

They have intruded the government into every sphere of public life, in spite of the Tenth Amendment, which limits the federal government’s powers to those enumerated in the Constitution.

They campaign against Christianity, trying to drive it out of the public decision-making process.

They promote abortion, and seek to force Christians and other objectors to fund it.

They promote homosexuality.

They play class warfare and encourage the people to covet their neighbors’ property, and to envy them.

They foment and inflame all kinds of bitter divisions and rivalries among the American people, for their own political advantage.

They steal from us. No one goes home poor from Capitol Hill.

They seek continually to erode our freedoms, especially those guaranteed to us under the First and Second Amendments.

Finally, I don’t know about you, but this particular administration’s lust for lawlessness, nakedly and boldly expressed by its top officials, leaves me breathless.

Do you really want to give more power to persons who have done so much wickedness with the power that they have?

 

 

Acting Guilty

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

A friend with whom I rarely agree about anything chides me for not believing the “settled science” of Man-Made Global Warming, as brought to you by those impeccably honest and hardly-ever mistaken Climate Scientists and the Democrat Party.

So far I’ve been unable to make him understand why I don’t believe them. But let me try again, here.

I don’t believe these scientists, and the reason for my disbelief is very simple. They’re acting guilty. I may not be able to evaluate scientific reports and computer models, but I think I can evaluate human behavior. And this is the behavior that convinces me that these scientists are not worthy of belief.

When they refuse to debate the issue, or even answer questions, but just demand we take their word for it because “the science is settled, the debate is over” (when there never was a debate in the first place), they’re acting guilty.

When they exchange countless emails discussing how to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, how to dispose of unwanted data, how to discredit and demonize their critics, and how to deceive the public, they’re acting guilty.

When, instead of answering their critics, they lobby politicians to have their critics’ grants cut off, they lobby universities not to permit their critics’ children to enroll, and publicly demand that the government silence the dissenters, or even cast them into prison, they’re acting guilty.

When they go to court to block any viewing of their data or their research, and insist on keeping it secret, and not open to independent examination, they’re acting guilty.

When they hob-nob with and curry the favor of sleazy left-wing politicians who blatantly try to use “science” as a vehicle for their neo-Stalinist agenda, they’re acting guilty.

Enough “climate scientists” have engaged in the above activities to taint the whole movement. Given that their political sponsors demand our money and our lives as the price of their Saving the Planet, it seems damn near suicidal to trust any of these people to any degree at all.

I don’t trust them because they’re acting guilty.

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How to Get Kicked Out of Big-Time Sports

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So Democrat donor and Clippers owner Don Sterling has a lifetime ban from the NBA, and a $2.5 million fine, This is because he made racist remarks on tape, which is not, in fact, against the law. The nooze media are enjoying an orgy of back-slapping: “Hah, we really got that no-good racist pig!”

To put it in historical context, consider some of these other suspensions.

In 1947, Brooklyn Dodgers’ manager Leo Durocher was suspended because of allegations that he was involved with “gamblers.” Since the Black Sox scandal of 1919, baseball has been acutely sensitive about gambling. (That’s why the all-time base hit leader, Pete Rose, is on a lifetime suspension.) My wife’s family remembered it as Durocher being suspended for writing love letters to movie star Laraine Day–whom he later married,  but who at the time was married to someone else. But the official reason given was consorting with gamblers. You’d think, if there was substance to it, that charge would have gotten him more than a one-year suspension.

In 1973, New York Yankee pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich were suspended for a year for swapping wives (and, later on, the family dogs and children, too). Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn said he levied the suspension because it was his duty to serve as “the conscience of baseball.”

From 1996 to 1998, Cincinnati Reds’ owner Marge Schott was suspended for allegedly making racist comments about all sorts of people. I think her problem was that no one in the baseball establishment liked her because she was a loose cannon. Owners are not supposed to be colorful. (That was George Steinbrenner’s problem, too.)

We observe, then, that what happened to Sterling has happened to others, more or less.

What is different about this example is that the nooze media arm of the Democrat Party intend to use it as campaign fodder in this year’s mid-term elections.

When your policies fail, one and all, and your leaders are schmucks, and it looks like your gang is about to lose the Senate–well, that’s when you play the race card. Over and over and over again–and hope you scare your voting base into turning out for you.

Which is more despicable–big sports or big politics?

Drinking from the Springs

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When I was a boy, we all used to drink from a spring that came bubbling out of the ground, a couple hundred yards from my house. People around the neighborhood used to come and fill bottles with the water. No one ever got sick.

The spring has been paved over. Gotta expand the school parking lot.

A little farther away there was another spring, a bigger one, in Roosevelt Park, a county park. My father used to send me there with half a dozen bottles at a time, in the 1970s. There would always be a crowd of people there. The water was pure and cold and delicious, and free.

I went to visit that spring yesterday. It’s still there; but for the first time ever, I found myself alone there. No one was getting any water. Maybe that’s because the County Water Dept. had posted signs all over the place, warning people “consume at your own risk: the source of this water is unknown and unprotected. We recommend boiling for a full two minutes before consuming.” In other words, they don’t know where the water originates from or how it gets to that precise spot in Roosevelt Park, and they don’t know whether it’s been tainted by pesticides or germs along the way.

The warning is certainly justified, but it’s a shame nonetheless. God gave the people in my neighborhood two springs of lovely drinking water, and one we’ve paved over and the other might be poisoned.

I know what actually happens when lib politicians–we don’t have any other kind, where I live–promise “to protect the environment.”

You’d better develop a taste for asphalt.

15 is How Many?

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Take a good look at the picture below, and think on this.

Each and every one of these people who has to count on his fingers to fifteen–including the ones who stare at the sign and say, “How come they show three hands? I ain’t got three hands”–has had hundreds of thousands of dollars in public money spent to “educate” him. Some of them have high school diplomas. Some even have college degrees.

Homeschool, homeschool, homeschool… before your children are irrevocably damaged by public education.

From Kindergarten to Kollege, in One Step

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As if we needed any further proof that “educators” have leaf-litter for brains, a New York school has canceled its annual kindergarten show because, say the bozos running the place, the kiddies have to keep working, uninterrupted, because they’re being prepared for “college and career.” In kindergarten.(See http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/04/26/kindergarten-show-canceled-so-kids-can-keep-working-to-become-college-and-career-ready-really/ )

Boys and girls, if you think you can just waltz into college and pick up a degree in Women’s Studies or Queer Literature, just like that, you’ve got another think coming! By cracky, you should’ve started cramming in the womb! Now you’re already five years old! If you had to start college tomorrow, you wouldn’t be ready! To say nothing of starting a career!

Are you absolutely, positively sure you can’t raise your own children as wisely as these “educators” are raising them? Are you sure you can’t do just as good a job of preparing your children to earn college degrees in ridiculous subjects and take on a lifetime’s worth of student debt?

Get some self-confidence, and homeschool your kids.

How Long Do Living Things Live?

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Mr. Nature here–say, how long are various kinds of plants and animals supposed to live?

My wife and I have lived at the same address since the Silurian Period. Next to our front steps, the same big red tulip blooms every year. Neither of us can remember a time when it didn’t, except for a spell when the squirrels would eat it as soon as it showed a bud. I think the squirrels who did that have all been eaten by the hawk. Anyhow, this ancient tulip bulb this year has produced a positively gorgeous flower.

A few feet away stands a dogwood tree that was here before we were. They say a dogwood lives only twenty years or so, but this one has that beat by a long, long way. It’s still putting out white flowers every spring.

I’m not one of those Jane Goodall types who gets to be on National Geographic, and can look at a handful of ants and tell you which one is which. Flowers and trees are easier because they don’t move around. So don’t ask me how old are any of the birds or animals around here.

Across the street, on top of St. Francis School, we now have a couple of nests of buzzards (turkey vultures, to you sticklers), going back no more than two years. It’ll be interesting to see how long they stay. I hope they’re not here just to wait for me. I will presume that the same individual buzzards use the nests from year to year. If it turns out they don’t, I guess I’ll have to go back to observing trees and tulips.

A Lesson in Folly

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You may not be able to believe this, but it’s a true story ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger_Bank_incident ).

When the Russo-Japanese War broke out in 1904, Russia’s Baltic Fleet steamed out of St. Petersburg to sail around the world and fight the Japanese. Upon entering the North Sea, the Russians encountered the British fishing fleet. Assuming that the trawlers were the Japanese Navy in disguise, the Baltic Fleet opened fire, doing terrible damage to the defenseless trawlers and shooting up some of its own ships as well. It could have been worse, but the Russian gunnery was atrocious. One Russian battleship fired 500 shells without hitting anything.

Understandably upset, the British closed the Suez Canal, and all their ports around the world, to Russian naval vessels. Having used up so much ammunition shooting up the fishing boats, the Baltic Fleet continued the long way around the world, getting rid of more ammo to stock up on coal from German ships, and arrived in Japanese waters in time to be annihilated by the Japanese Navy, which wasn’t short on ammo.

The lesson? Russia’s fleet and individual vessels were commanded by naval professionals, trained and experienced, who supposedly knew what they were doing. Just like the experts who gave us the Edsel, Heaven’s Gate, and Obamacare supposedly knew what they were doing.

How much unchecked power do we want to give our experts?