Making sense out of something odd...

The people in one of the buildings across the way have about a dozen empty liquor and liqueur bottles in their kitchen window. The only rational purpose that I can determine for doing this would be for them to serve as a navigational aid for the police during disturbance calls.

On Sustainability

Sustainability.

That's supposed to be a good thing, right? I looked on Google and it suggested the following terms:

"sustainable agriculture", "sustainable architecture", "sustainable business model", "sustainable communities", "sustainable design", "sustainable development", "sustainable energy", "sustainable foods", "sustainable living", "sustainable packaging", "sustainable products" and so forth.

The idea is that you can preface just about anything with the word "sustainable" and it's supposedly better, more environmentally friendly and less wasteful of the earth's resources than the Old Ways.

What you're not supposed to notice is that all of these ideas involve social pressure to conform to top-down ideas being pushed at you in order to inch you towards acceptance of a Third-world standard of living (in exchange for getting to feel morally superior.)

There is one idea that those pushing sustainable solutions have never considered: SUSTAINABLE GOVERNMENT.

After all, it logically follows that if other aspects of society are wasteful and excessive, then government must be as well.

Try mentioning the concept of sustainable government to a liberal/statist in conversation sometime. I promise you they'll be stumbling over the conceptual contradictions you've thrown underfoot and it'll be fun to watch.

ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE 44 DAYS AGO?

Shades of Carter.

Squared.

The Classics Club - Looking for list of titles

Some years ago, I subscribed to an "on approval" book club called The Classics Club, originally published by Walter J. Black in the 1940s.

I've got over thirty of the titles, and have found a number of others, but have never been able to locate a complete list of titles for this series.

I AM SEEKING THIS INFORMATION AND WOULD LIKE TO COMPLETE THIS COLLECTION AS LONG AS THE NUMBER OF VOLUMES IS REASONABLY FINITE.

Alas, Walter J. Black went out of business in the 1980s.

Here is the list of titles and authors that I either have or have confirmed are in the series:

Own?	Title	Author
true	A Tale of Two Cities	Charles Dickens
false	Autobiography	Benjamin Franklin
true	Discourses	Epictetus
true	Essays and New Atlantis	Francis Bacon
true	Essays, Poems, Addresses	Ralph Waldo Emerson
true	Fathers and Sons	Turgenev
true	Five Great Dialogues	Plato
true	Gulliver's Travels	Jonathan Swift
true	Henry Esmond	Thackeray
false	Lives of the Saints
true	Meditations	Marcus Aurelius
true	Old Goriot	Balzac
true	On Man In The Universe	Aristotle
true	On Politics And Education	John Locke
true	On The Nature Of Things	Lucretius
true	Paradise Lost and Other Poems	John Milton
false	Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen
false	Progress and Poverty	Henry George
false	Robinson Crusoe	Daniel Defoe
true	Selected Essays	Montaigne
true	Selected Lives And Essays	Plutarch
false	Selected Plays	Henrik Ibsen
true	Selected Poems	Horace
true	Selected Poems	Walt Whitman
true	Selected Poems	Robert Browning
false	Selected Stories	Anton Chekov [ADDED]
false	Selected Tales and Poems	Edgar Allan Poe
true	Selected Works	Cicero
true	Thaïs/Sylvestre Bonnard	Anatole France
true	The Beginnings of Modern Science	Boynton
false	The Canterbury Tales	Geoffrey Chaucer
true	The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Vol. I, Comedies	William Shakespeare
true	The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Vol. II, Histories	William Shakespeare
true	The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Vol. III, Tragedies	William Shakespeare
false	The Golden Treasury	Palgrave
true	The History of Plymouth	William Bradford
true	The Iliad	Homer
true	The Law of War and Peace	Hugo Grotius
true	The Odyssey	Homer
true	The Praise of Folly	Erasmus
false	The Rubiyat	Omar Khayyam
true	The Way of All Flesh	Samuel Butler
true	Two Years Before The Mast	Richard Henry Dana
true	Utopia	Sir Thomas More
true	Walden	Henry David Thoreau

VanDerLeun Has "The Name In The Stone" Up Again

Gerard VanDerLeun can write.

If you don't believe me, then go read this, and come back and tell me that.

Who is "Buckhead" for the WBEZ tapes?

Remember 2004, Dan Rather, the "fake but accurate" memo, and a poster on Freerepublic.com named "Buckhead" who was the first to spot the fact that something was not quite right about that memo?

Well, now we have the tapes of Obama, Ayers, et al., in the WBEZ (Chicago National Proletarian Radio) archives that, as far as settling the issue of Barack 0bama being a socialist, are like the punchline to the old joke, the one where the guy asks the girl if she'd sleep with him for a million dollars, and she says, "Sure!".

Then he asks her if she'd sleep with him for a quarter, and her indignant response is, "What kind of a girl do you think I am?"

He replies, "We've already settled that question, now we're just negotiating the price."

But I digress.

I first saw this on one of the PUMA blogs, but the problem with the blogosphere is frequently in trying to figure out just where something viral originated.

So I'm asking, "Who found this first?"

BTW, I still maintain that we haven't seen youthful enthusiasm like this in a political campaign since McGovern in 1972.

And we all know how well *that* worked out, don't we?

I predict McCain/Palin will win big.

And many, many thanks to the PUMAs.

They are more high-spirited now than a good number of rather dour Republicans are at this point.

Palin hits *another one* out of the park (Henderson, NV)

I posted this on reclusiveleftist and thought it worth putting up here.

Violet:

Thank you.

Palin hits one outta the park. Again.

Methinks the 0bamaBots have “misunderestimated” Sarah Palin.

Either she wrote it herself or somebody’s writing for her who *really* knows her “voice”.

Frankly, I think that the McCain campaign has finally “turned her loose” as either they think they have nothing to lose by so doing, or [here's what I *really* think]:

The internals are telling *both* campaigns something different that what we’re seeing in the publicly released results.

Obama is expending resources and travelling to states that supposedly he has “locked up”.

McCain and Palin are going to states that have supposedly fallen into the “solidly blue” category.

Either both campaigns have suddenly gone stupid or something’s up, which, from the looks of things, doesn’t look good for the 0-man.

I said months ago regarding the 0bama campaign:

“I haven’t seen this much youthful enthusiasm since the McGovern campaign of 1972.”

And we *all* know how well that one worked out…

Thanks again, and best regards,

YZ