Sigurd the Crusader Invents An Interesting Maneuver:

From the Saga named for him:

King Sigurd then sailed eastward along the coast of Serkland, and came to an island there called Forminterra. There a great many heathen Moors had taken up their dwelling in a cave, and had built a strong stone wall before its mouth. They harried the country all round, and carried all their booty to their cave. King Sigurd landed on this island, and went to the cave; but it lay in a precipice, and there was a high winding path to the stone wall, and the precipice above projected over it. The heathens defended the stone wall, and were not afraid of the Northmen's arms; for they could throw stones, or shoot down upon the Northmen under their feet; neither did the Northmen, under such circumstances, dare to mount up. The heathens took their clothes and other valuable things, carried them out upon the wall, spread them out before the Northmen, shouted, and defied them, and upbraided them as cowards. Then Sigurd fell upon this plan. He had two ship's boats, such as we call barks, drawn up the precipice right above the mouth of the cave; and had thick ropes fastened around the stem, stern, and hull of each. In these boats as many men went as could find room, and then the boats were lowered by the ropes down in front of the mouth of the cave; and the men in the boats shot with stones and missiles into the cave, and the heathens were thus driven from the stone wall.

Then Sigurd with his troops climbed up the precipice to the foot of the stone wall, which they succeeded in breaking down, so that they came into the cave. Now the heathens fled within the stone wall that was built across the cave; on which the king ordered large trees to be brought to the cave, made a great pile in the mouth of it, and set fire to the wood. When the fire and smoke got the upper hand, some of the heathens lost their lives in it; some fled; some fell by the hands of the Northmen; and part were killed, part burned; and the Northmen made the greatest booty they had got on all their expeditions.

The lesson: every place of strength has a weakness. It's only that no one has yet thought of it.

There is always a thing forgotten
When all the world goes well;
A thing forgotten, as long ago
When the gods forgot the mistletoe,
And soundless as an arrow of snow
The arrow of anguish fell.

Bonus question: who knows why 'an arrow of snow' is such an appropriate metaphor in the context of poems about the Vikings?

What is to be done?

What Is To Be Done?

The real provocation here is the part of the law that imposes an individual mandate to purchase a hugely expensive product, with resistance punishable by up to five years in prison. Just to make sure we're clear on this, I'll cite Media Matter's own page, claiming to "debunk" that claim. It's not true that the law will send you to prison for not maintaining 'acceptable' levels of insurance; the law only forces you to pay a fine. It's only if you don't pay the fine that you go to prison. But hey, they add, "Willful failure to pay taxes of any sort can result in civil or criminal penalties." Indeed they can, but that doesn't change the fact that this is something new. We have now brought the 'willful failure' to purchase a private product from an insurance corporation into the realm of things we will resolve through punitive taxes, and prison time if you resist the tax.

Anyone who wants to complain about the rise of violent rhetoric among opponents of the law should recognize that the law is what first threatened violence. Throwing people into prison is violence. Extracting money from people under threat of throwing them into prison is violence. It was this law that decided to make "health care" into the kind of issue that we resolve, not with the market by other free private decisions, but through violence and threats of violence.

Health care has never been that kind of issue in America before. Until this law is repealed we have an era in which Americans are under actual physical threat over how they purchase insurance, or make decisions about the care of their family members.

The fact that the police and the courts are 'lawful violence' and resistance is not lawful is a reasonable point to make. It's worth remembering, when making that point, that the American tradition is laid on the idea that we have a right to revolt against tyrannical authority. The British Army was also 'lawful violence,' and the Stamp Act was far less provocation than this.

Indeed, I haven't quite finished describing just how provocative this really is. The fact that the individual mandate is enforcable by arrest and prison time is only part of the issue. The other part is that the mandate has been set so high that most American families will only be able to afford it through Federal subsidies. That means two things:

1) Taking a handout from the government will no longer be a matter for those who are down on their luck, to be done only for as long as absolutely necessary to get back on your feet. It will be the normal condition for American families. From now on, most of us will be dependent on a government handout -- because the government has mandated that we be dependent. That redefines the basic nature of the relationship between government "charity" and what was supposed to be a free and independent People.

2) Because of this dependence, we will be subject to whatever conditions the government puts on the aid. You can compare the experience of buying food with your own cash versus buying food with food stamps: suddenly, you're not really free just to get what you want. You have to submit to the approval of a distant government bureaucracy, which will tell you whether what you want is acceptable or not.

This mandate and that approval are at the core of the 'cost bending' aspects of this bill: in other words, they are indispensable to the whole idea of HCR as it has been put forward. The reason that this allegedly will not break the budget is that everyone will have to buy insurance at this massively expensive level, and that we'll be able to establish 'comparative effectiveness boards' to deny treatments to Americans that the government decides are too expensive.

Put in the most basic terms, the average American family is being told that they will be required to be a ward of the state, and that refusal to comply will result in fines, or arrest and up to five years in prison. Compliance, however, will mean that the decisions about what medical treatments are open to their families will be made by the government, no longer by the family.

What would Patrick Henry have said about that?

This is not a call for violence by me, nor is it a suggestion that violence is legitimate at this time. There are several years in which to rectify this error before that part of the law goes into effect. All I mean to say here is that the American tradition clearly endorses violence against far less tyrannical exercises of power than this. If we get to the point that people are really being threatened with arrest over this mandate, then the government will be the one threatening violence. If that draws a violent response from the citizenry, that may be a legitimate response according to our political tradition.

I think it's important to understand that, especially for those on the pro-HCR side. If you put people in this position, it won't do to complain that they are wicked for resorting to violence. They will reply that you ought not to complain about violence being introduced to the debate, as you introduced it. And they will feel legitimate in using violence against you; nor is it clear that they are wrong, given America's particular political tradition.

This is not the limit of the provocation, by the way; it's only the worst of the provocation. The law is provocative in requiring states to completely rewrite a huge percentage of their budgets in spite of a majority of states not wishing to do so. There are many other things people might complain about as well. Yet it is this imposition of a mandate, backed with the threat of prison, that makes this law an act of tyranny that might give the People a legitimate cause to revolt against Federal authority.

Now, what ought to be done instead of violence:

The best thing is for this to be resolved quickly, and through peaceful and constitutional means. The best way for that to happen is through state government action. The states should call for a constitutional convention to reinforce the restraints on the Federal government's power.

At a minimum, we should act to ensure that the commerce clause is restored to its originalist notion; and that we specify that neither Congress nor the executive branch may pass any laws, nor spend any money, in pursuit of any power not specifically delegated in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

I might suggest that the states consider additional rebalancing provisions, such as repeal of the 17th Amendment. Another very good idea would be to reinforce the originalist position that only the Congress may craft laws and regulations; a lot of that has been done by Federal executive agencies, under Congressional delegation of authority. The SCOTUS used to view such delegation as unconstitutional, and indeed it is not constitutional on an orginalist view; it may be worth re-banning the practice in order to ensure that the Federal government is returned to its intended, proper, constitutional limits.

Many of you are effectively without a voice at the Federal level, given that the opposition party has been reduced to ineffectiveness and wings of the Democratic party have proven submissive. However, your state governments still are under your control to a much greater degree. As they are also the place where action can be most effectively located, I suggest we begin here.

If the 2010 elections produce a Congress that is more balanced and responsive to the people, there may be some limited things that can be done as well. However, it is unlikely that repeal can be effected at the Federal level until 2013. The states are in play even right now. That is where we should focus, and the place where a peaceful and lawful resolution can be most readily created.

It is important for pro-HCR people to realize that they have provoked a potential legitimate revolt, I said above; it is important for anti-HCR people to realize the same thing. If we do not find a way to resolve this peacefully and through politics, there may be serious consequences. Those of us who are devoted to the survival and success of the Republic ought to make action a priority in the coming years, before this mandate goes into effect. It is a dangerous provocation, and one that is likely to produce very bad results if the Federal government tries to enforce it.

The brakes come off

The Brakes Come Off:

I'm sure many of you might like to discuss the passage of the health care bill in the House last night. I've been on a pretty even keel about this all along, simply because I can't see any way in which this thing lasts long enough to create the fundamental change in American society that Mark Steyn sees. The fact is that, pre-HCR, we had somewhere around $100 Trillion in unfunded liabilities. We've been a train racing down the mountain to Insolvency Gorge; all the HCR bill does is tear off what were already stressed and failing brakes.

From my perspective, then, all this means is that we get to the crash faster. The important questions have always been what we'd do after the crash, since it was clear these last few years that neither party in Washington intended to be the ones who avoided the crash.

However, if you really want to avoid it, take heart! The best thing that could have happened to you has happened. If the Stupak faction had held firm, yesterday would have been the end of HCR. We'd have a good six months of history to take people's minds off the attempt. Now, with the court cases that are certain to happen, and the possibility of the states demanding its repeal, it'll continue to be headline news every night. People will still be focused on it come Election Day, and the Tea Party movement -- which might be the one chance for those who'd really like to avoid seeing the nation crash into the aforementioned gorge -- will be strengthened by mounting populist outrage, and the states' need for a political force to help them repeal this before it destroys them.

We may even get to see a Constitutional Convention forced by the states. The Balanced Budget Amendment got 32 of the required 34 states to sign its petition; this bill creates even more pressure on the state governments than any previous act of Congress. A "reasserting the 10th Amendment" petition might well get the required 34 states, if the challenges to this bill fail in Federal court.

It's encouraging that there is a political movement forming around the idea of holding Congress to Art. 1 Sect. 8 and the 10th Amendment, just when one is needed. And it's good that this movement is now almost guaranteed to build in size and power before the elections, instead of fading away. It needs to continue to build and hold its power through at least 2012 to achieve the real effects that we need to save the country; but if it doesn't, we'll get those effects anyway. They'll just come through fire, instead, when the government can no longer pretend it will or can keep its word.

Pretty symbolic that the US lost its AAA bond rating in the same news cycle as the passage of this beast, eh? Would you loan this government money?

Horace's Epistles

Grim's Hall Book Club: Horace's Epistles

We'll be looking at Plutarch soon. Since we had no assigned reading for this week, though, let's take a look at something we can glance over today. I'm thinking we might usefully discuss a few of Horace's letters, specifically, the first, fifth, and sixth of the letters from his first book.

In the first letter, he declares his devotion to the study of virtue:

It is virtue, to fly vice; and the highest wisdom, to have lived free from folly.

Yet in the fifth letter, he declares to his guest his readiness to pursue folly in his expression of the virtue of hospitality:

We shall have free liberty to prolong the summer evening with friendly conversation. To what purpose have I fortune, if I may not use it? He that is sparing out of regard to his heir, and too niggardly, is next neighbor to a madman. I will begin to drink and scatter flowers, and I will endure even to be accounted foolish. What does not wine freely drunken enterprise? It discloses secrets; commands our hopes to be ratified; pushes the dastard on to the fight; removes the pressure from troubled minds; teaches the arts. Whom have not plentiful cups made eloquent?

In the sixth letter, he further complicates the picture:

Let the wise man bear the name of fool, the just of unjust; if he pursue virtue itself beyond proper bounds.... Lucullus, as they say, being asked if he could lend a hundred cloaks for the stage, “How can I so many?” said he: “yet I will see, and send as many as I have;” a little after he writes that he had five thousand cloaks in his house; they might take part of them, or all. It is a scanty house, where there are not many things superfluous, and which escape the owner’s notice, and are the gain of pilfering slaves.

In resolving these apparent conflicts we come to understand what Horace really meant. How should they be resolved?

Famous Castles

Some Interesting Photos of Castles:

I'd not encountered "ODDEE" before, so I'm not sure what this website is really about or where it's coming from. Still, they had an interesting short piece on famous and fascinating castles. There was also a reader-submitted list that is at least as good as the original piece.

The castles go from the most elaborate designs made without a serious purpose for defense, to the small, pragmatic fortified "Schloss" of a German raubritter.



Of particular interest is Marienburg, or "Mary's Castle," built by the Teutonic Order out of bricks instead of stone. The other one that caught my eye was the Hunyad Castle, where Vlad the Impaler was imprisoned. It is probably the most fearsome looking of the fortifications, having the look of a serious fighting position that was decorated entirely as an afterthought.

St. Patrick's Day

Happy St. Patrick's Day:

Remember, tonight of all nights, that God loves a good fight, as long as it's fought with a good heart.

The Wild Colonial Boy - The Cl...

So we loosed a bloomin' volley,
An' we made the beggars cut,
An' when our pouch was emptied out.
We used the bloomin' butt,
Ho! My!
Don't yer come anigh,
When Tommy is a playin' with the baynit an' the butt.
--Barrack Room Ballad.

Lieutenant James Adamson was awarded the Military Cross after killing two insurgents during close quarter combat in Helmand's notorious "Green Zone".

The 24-year-old officer, a member of the 5th battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, revealed that he shouted "have some of this" before shooting dead a gunman who had just emerged from a maize field.

Seconds later and out of ammunition, the lieutenant leapt over a river bank and killed a second insurgent machine-gunner with a single thrust of his bayonet in the man's chest.

Traditionalist.

Richard Fernandez: The Age of Faith:

We talk about America and China competing for influence in Africa, but the Belmont Club points out that we thereby miss the real story.

In a process largely unnoticed in the West, billions of people in Asia and Africa have swapped out their indigenous faiths for either Christianity or Islam. And to an even greater astonishment of Western intellectuals most have chosen Christianity. Now the equalization of numbers has caused a fault line to appear through the Third World at about the tenth degree of latitude where the two aggregations face each other “at daggers drawn”.

The word “Christian”, associated in the 19th and 20th centuries with the missionary enterprises of Europe, has now come to mean something different in political terms. Today Christianity is a religion of the Third World. Europeans have largely converted to some soft and watered-down variation of the West’s only indigenous creed, Marxism, as represented by John Lennon’s “Imagine” song. Christianity can no longer be associated largely with the West. Ex oriente lux a phrase which once described the belief that all great world religions rose in the East is now truer than ever. With Marxism shrinking to the margins of the Guardian, the monotheisms have reclaimed the field....

The US is more deeply Christian than Europe, but a large percentage of its ruling class belongs to the "Imagine" religion instead.

Still, the real disadvantage here goes to China. China cannot market itself to Muslims in Africa as the competitor to America. To the degree that Africa is Christian, it will not look to China for leadership -- though there are millions of Chinese Christians, the state is in theory opposed to the faith. Muslims will not look to China for leadership either: worse than Christianity for Islam is polytheism (e.g., Chinese folk religion, certain variations of Buddhism) or the rejection of god (e.g, scientific atheism, other variations of Buddhism).

We may yet see the right in America build a unity on Christian grounds, and so adapt itself to the increasing percentage of Americans who are coming from the Catholicism of Latin America. If we do, America's leadership position within Africa -- and as a potential source of admiration for Chinese Christians -- will increase.

Grim's Hall Book Club: Franklin/Wife of Bath's Tale

Grim's Hall Book Club: The Fraklin's Tale and The Wife of Bath's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer

We looked at The Franklin's Tale and The Wife of Bath's Tale as well this week.

I wanted to include these because there was so much interest in Chaucer associated with our discussion about the descriptions of women in The Knight's Tale and The Miller's Tale. One of the things that you may not know about Chaucer unless you read the whole of The Canterbury Tales is that he chases the questions of men and women all the way around, trying to view them from every side. So, you have loyal wives and disloyal wives; you have devoted husbands and scoundrels; you have tales of courtly love, and ribald stories; you view it from the perspective of the Church, and from very earthy perspectives.

The Wife of Bath's Tale shows some signs of being among Chaucer's favorites. For one thing, he gives her an extraordinary prologue! It's as long as some of the tales by itself, and contains a remarkable number of well developed theological arguments. It also includes some ribald "advice" on how to chew up a husband who gives you trouble, although it advises also that you accord with one in peace once he stops trying to boss you around. That last bit of advice is the most important, and makes up the subject of the actual story.

The story is Arthurian, and treats the question of "What women want most." What it proves that they want most is sovereignty: in Chaucer's version of this story, over their men as well as themselves. This is not the only version of this story, however, and in many versions it is simply to be sovereign over themselves.

Since we all read Cassandra as well, I'd like to mention this piece, which was a guest post at the blog of the lady who wrote the 'frigid wife' piece she cited earlier this week. The man who wrote the guest post took his lady up on the challenge to read some romance novels, which would explore the same question -- "What do women want?" He discovers that what they want is men who are "tall," who "can't be bald," who "move in without invitation and touch" (though noting that only the hero is welcome to do this! The same quality that makes the hero more attractive makes the villain wicked and hateful), be "preternaturally competent and successful at everything," "Have money," etc. But then he gets to this one:

2. Let her rescue herself.

This surprised me. I was under the impression that the hero’s role in romances was to rescue the heroine. But in all of these books the heroine has the most significant role in her own triumph over adversity.

Ah, well, that's the real trick, isn't it? The male figure in this story isn't the hero. He's the love interest. The damsel in distress is still the damsel; but the difference between a story written by a man and a story written by a woman is that in the women-written romances, the woman rescues herself.

What is the man for, then? He's the love interest. That's all, really; love is important enough that he doesn't need to do more than love and be loved.

The Wife of Bath's Tale puts the lady in the role of the rescuer, even of the knight. In learning to serve her and be guided by her, the knight -- it is usually Sir Gawain, in this tale, though Chaucer doesn't name him -- finds a lady love who is both beautiful to him and faithful, though at first he took her to be rather otherwise.

In The Franklin's Tale, we have a story with some resonance today: it is the story of a military wife whose husband is deployed, and who finds herself being pursued by a young squire who develops an ardent fascination with her. She is loyal to her husband and true, but finds herself responding to his flirtation with a playful promise she takes to be impossible. The squire arranges to have a wizard and illusionist make the impossible appear to come true, and then reminds the lady of her promise to give her love to him.

The lady's response is virtuous: she considers, but rejects, suicide, and instead confesses everything to her husband so they may think about the matter together. The knight who is her husband takes her honor to be as important as his own, and says that she must keep her word having given it. In spite of the sorrow and pain he feels, and the shame this will bring on him, he counsels her to be as bound by her word as he would be by his own.

She goes to do this, but is so upset by it that the squire is moved by her pain and love for her husband to release her from her vow. The wizard, in return, is moved by the squire's mercy, and releases the young man from his debt. The tale ends:

"Masters, this question would I ask you now:
Which was most generous, do you think, and how.
Pray tell me this before you farther wend.
I can no more, my tale is at an end."

It's a good question. Is the knight the most generous, to put his lady's honor at the level of his own? Is the lady the most generous, to have loved her husband so much as to trust him with her sorrow? Is the squire the most generous, to lay aside his claim on the lady in honor of the truth of her heart? Or is it the illusionist, who has a legitimate claim on the squire that the squire brought on himself by wickedness, but who lets it go when he sees the squire abandoning his evil?

Nelson Lee

Grim's Hall Book Club: Nelson Lee's Three Years Among the Comanches:

Quite a story! The most memorable scene for me is the shipwreck, early in the tale, where Lee describes hanging from the mast and watching the swirling waters below. What was the part that sticks with you?

The question attending Lee's book is whether or not it is legitimate. It would be welcome, in a sense, to suppose that it wasn't: then we could dismiss the various cruelties, especially toward babies, as being simple legends. Indeed, one of the oddities is the cruelty toward babies; we see that with tales about the Comanches, but normally frontier stories suggest that the Indians kept captured children and raised them, even if they slaughtered adults or traded them as slaves.

So is it legitimate? The Handbook of Texas, Online, says:

Of this probably spurious classic work, Walter Prescott Webb stated that "there is no better description of the life of the Texas Rangers than that of Nelson Lee." The book has since been a source for several writers about Comanche culture. But in 1982 anthropologist Melburn D. Thurman called Lee's account of Comanche ceremonies "blatantly erroneous" and demonstrated that Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel's discussion of the "Comanche" Green Corn Ceremony in The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains (1952) employed questionable data from Lee's book. Though noted Indian scholars have long identified the Comanches as a nonsedentary and therefore nonagricultural people, Lee narrated to his New York editors that Comanches planted corn, beans, and tobacco. Other wildly erroneous claims abound. Lee said that the Comanches wrote hieroglyphics on tree bark; built villages with central squares, streets, and houses of important men located on the squares; and resolved irreconcilable differences between two adversaries by lashing them together with a cord and requiring them to fight to the death. Accordingly, Thurman and other specialists of Plains Indians disputed Lee's captivity claims and, by extension, other claims he makes concerning his exploits.

I'm left admiring the quality of the tale, but I think we have to believe that some of the wilder stories were put in to make it salable.

Yet the Rangers have always liked this book, and still like it, as evidenced by the fact that it's posted on their website. What do you think?

Star Wars in Old Norse

Tattúínárdœla saga:

Via Lars Walker, a highly unusual saga in Old Norse:

After this killing, for which Anakinn’s owner (and implied father) refuses to pay compensation, Anakinn’s mother, an enslaved Irish princess, foresees a great future for Anakinn as a “jeði” (the exact provenance of this word is unknown but perhaps represents an intentionally humorous Irish mispronunciation of “goði”). This compels Anakinn to recite his first verse:

Þat mælti mín móðir,
at mér skyldi kaupa
fley ok fagrar árar
fara á brott með jeðum,
standa upp í stafni,
stýra dýrum xwingi,
halda svá til hafnar,
hǫggva mann ok annan.

There are quite a few more posts on the blog, with most of the text being in the Old Norse. It's a fairly plausible bit, actually: the dialogue is just what the sagas should contain.

Honor is Absent

The Absence of Honor:

Perhaps Dan Riehl qualifies as a "conservative blogger" in some sense, but not in any sense that matters to me. If you're willing to dispense with the idea of not calling for the death of the injured wives and children of your political foes, you've already walked away from everything I ever wanted to conserve.

In his comments section, Riehl justifies himself: "I've been watching you high-minded twirps get your lunch money stolen by the Left for years."

That's not true: who won the fight on Iraq, and on holding out in Iraq long enough for the good to come? It was those who fought with honor, and who by honor won the victory both here and in Iraq itself. We sometimes fought hard, against our foes; we didn't wage war on their wives and children.

Yes, the opposition does; we've seen just such war waged on then-Governor Palin and her children. Perhaps in part due to such tactics, Obama won an election. That happens; you can't win 'em all. Neither Obama nor his allies nor his policies will last more than a brief season -- if he manages to enact any policies at all. His ideas were exhausted when he arrived, and they have already been broken by the change in economic fortune. These policies are in rapid retreat across the world. This is the end of the age of his kind; you will soon see the last of them, whatever you do.

Lots of the commenters reference Alinsky in support of Riehl's tactic. That's mere power worship, to say that it worked once, and therefore we "must" follow to compete. We need not. What will win the next election is the economy and the cancer of Federal spending promises; all the Alinsky tactics in the world will not save the candidate on the wrong side of that issue.

Alinsky dedicated his work to Lucifer. Take him at his word, and take his word as a signpost as to where his road may take you. The Devil is granted an hour now and then, but that doesn't mean he's won the war, or that it's time to change your flag. Do what is right, and have faith.

WTF? Jefferson

I'm Sorry, But This Is A Really Strange Thing To Do:

The Texas Board of Education drops Thomas Jefferson from its early modern political philosophy (folded into "social studies," in high school). They add in his place John Calvin, Blackstone, and St. Thomas Aquinas.

Now, obviously the point of this is to play down the importance of the Enlightenment, and to restore the position of certain religious thinkers, and of the powerful heritage of traditional British law. That's OK: we are probably at the right moment to rethink the Enlightenment's place in our heritage, and to perhaps revise downward its importance somewhat.

However, if you were going to do that, wouldn't you get rid of one of the other Enlightenment thinkers, given that you're teaching students who live in the United States of America? Does a citizen of the United States and the great state of Texas really need to know more about Charles de Montesquieu's thinking than he knows about Thomas Jefferson's? Really?

Dangerous Work

Dangerous Work:

Via Arts & Letters Daily, a story about working in the Arctic.

If something happens, and you leave your vehicle, you will not be rescued in time. You do not leave the road; to leave the road is to die. You are given an orange safety vest, so they can find your body, in case you don’t listen.

The road is usually a frozen river. To break through the ice and fall into the river is yet another way to die. Sometimes the road is the frozen-over Arctic Ocean. When you break through that ice, you sink. They say it’s the air bubbles in your decomposing body that cause it to float, and in the sub-freezing water of the Arctic Ocean, human bodies don’t decompose. If you fall into the Arctic Ocean, your corpse may be well-preserved, but no one will risk a life, or expend the cost, to retrieve it.

Suppose you do fall in. By the time you reach the surface, the hole you fell into may have frozen over already. If you can punch through ice with lungs full of 35° water, maybe you deserve to live, but then you’re soaking wet in subzero temperatures, and you will spend your last few conscious minutes too delirious with hypothermia to be thankful that your next of kin will have something to bury.

Once, I asked a guy who’d worked up there for twenty-five years if he’d known of anyone who’d fallen through the ice and lived. He could think of only two.... [one] rescued driver immediately went to the bar, where he wasted no time telling his story. A number of his listeners didn’t believe him and even took umbrage with the tale, at which point, the rescued driver became aggrieved, and a fight broke out. Less than twelve hours after he was submerged beneath the ice of the Arctic Ocean — a situation that no one in recent history had ever survived — the rescued driver was nearly beaten to death in a dingy bar. He was taken back to the same hospital he had just left, and this time, he was there for two months.

The story about walking to the Post Office is amazing, too. The description of the place as resembling the Moon reminds me of FOB Hammer; and indeed, it suggests that someday we really will go places like the moon, or Mars, to live and work. We already do.

Cooking with Cast Iron:

Instapundit links this enthusiastic chef on cast iron cooking.

Here at the Hall, I cook with little else. I have a few stainless steel pots that I use for things like warming sauces, but any serious cooking is done on black iron. I use it for roasts, steaks, etc., as everyone else does; but it also works extremely well for quesadillas and grilled sandwiches, any sort of frying, chili or stew, and so forth.

A recent discovery: cast iron works even better than having a pizza stone for baking deliciously crisp pizza crusts. Make your pie up in a skillet, and bake it in the skillet. It comes out perfect every time. You don't even have to oil the skillet -- just toss a bit of corn meal in the bottom so nothing sticks.

Pairings

Pairings:

Pairing one:

Gallup: more and more Americans think Global Warming is exaggerated.

TWS: A five page report on Climate Change fraud and error.

Pairing two:

In Kentucky, if you don't vote for 'revenue enhancement', your district doesn't get school money.

In Kansas City, bankruptcy concerns close half of the schools.

Death of Euro

The Death of the Euro:

The Economist has a five page article on the troubles in Europe. They call for a limited bailout, coupled with new regulatory powers that would keep Greece-type situations from recurring.

Arts & Letters Daily interprets the article thus: "The Euro is finished."

That's not what the article says; but it may very well be the truth. Arts & Letters Daily adds this and this to its reasoning.

Funny Dowd

The Funniest Thing She's Ever Written:

From Maureen Dowd, on her trip to Saudi Arabia:

Couldn’t Mecca, I asked the royals, be opened to non-Muslims during the off-season?

The problem with her being a print journalist is that there were consequently no cameras in the room. That would have been something to see.

Hooah!

Hooah!

Bill Whittle, in rare form -- as he might be, speaking of one of his own.

My brother Steve is a year younger than me. Right around age 13 Stevie used to take a tent, his dog and a shotgun and hitchhike from our home in South Florida out into the Everglades. He’d usually be gone or two or three days. Did my mom worry about him? Yes she did, but on some level I guess she preferred to raise an independent boy who was living his life to the fullest rather than perpetually trying to defend a life-long infant.

A few months ago I heard in passing that Steve had been on his way to work one morning when he passed a car that was on fire with the driver still inside. He pulled over, grabbed his crowbar, smashed the window and with the help of another passing citizen pulled her out and saved her life. He never thought to mention this to me.

Now that's the kind of boy a man could be proud to raise.

Correcting the Ill-Mannered

Correcting the Ill-Mannered:

I was visiting beautiful Athens, Georgia, today; and after I finished my business there I went to get some coffee. On approach to the coffee shop I noticed a homeless man sitting at one of the tables -- homeless, but with enough wealth to buy a cup of coffee, and therefore with every right to occupy one of their seats for a while.

Just as I was passing by, someone in a nearby car leaned on their horn in displeasure. As they stopped, the homeless man yelled out: "This ain't New York City!"

"Hear, hear," I said, and we exchanged a smile as I went to get my coffee.

So, I put it to you: is this a wonderful thing about America, where even the homeless may buy dignity for the price of a cup of coffee, and chide the wealthy for their rudeness? Or is it a wonderful thing about the South, where being downtrodden does not mean that you will suffer poor manners?

I suppose it could be both.