Chicagoboyz Cycling Series: Critical Mass (Chicago)

Last Friday Critical Mass rode in Chicago. I can see it from my balcony in River North – they are traveling Northbound on Lasalle Street. Next time I will try to get down there in person so I can get some of the characters Jonathan talked about down in Florida.

In true Chicago style I don’t have to worry about bicycles because mine was stolen. The hilarious part was that the Chicago police employee actually came and dusted for prints. It definitely wasn’t worth it because you can’t get that messy fingerprint dust off your door jamb or anything else and God knows that no action was taken to find the perpetrators.

What is a conservative ?

Right now we have the immigration bill that has been passed by the Senate after being written by the “Gang of 8.” This bill, like so many major pieces of legislation lately, was written in secrecy and has not been through the usual committee process. “We have to pass it to see what is in it.”

As if Obamacare were not enough, here we have another opaque and mysterious bit of legislation that is thousands of pages of incomprehensible legalese.

Jennifer Rubin weighs in with a rather beltway-oriented view. Fair enough as she writes in the Washington Post.

The immigration battle, the debate over U.S. involvement in Syria and the flap over NSA surveillance have suggested two starkly different visions of the GOP as well as two potential paths for the GOP.

The question remains whether the GOP will become the party of: Sen. Rand Paul, Ky., or Sen. Kelly Ayotte, N.H., on national security; The Gang of Eight or the Gang of Three (Sens. Mike Lee, Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions) on immigration; Sen. Rob Portman, Ohio, or Rick Santorum on gay marriage; Broad-based appeal (e.g. Govs. Chris Christie, Gov. Scott Walker) or losing ideologues (Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Michele Bachmann). I don’t know that Angle and O’Donnell were “ideologues.” Angle, at least was an amateur, somewhat like other candidates supported by the Tea Party.

I’m not sure I agree with her choices but let’s think about it.

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Civic Association and Loneliness: Two Sides of the Coin in the English-Speaking World

An excellent article, Family Ties in Western Europe: Persistent Contrasts by David Sven Reher, Population and Development Review, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Jun., 1998), pp. 203-234 contains some fascinating passages which are highly consistent with the arguments we make in America 3.0:

Loneliness is one of the most important social problems in weak-family societies. I refer to the loneliness of the individual who must confront the world and his own life without the safety net of familial support so characteristic of strong-family regions.'” Suicide, often an indirect consequence of loneliness, tends to be far higher in northern Europe and the United States than it is in southern Europe.” The effects of loneliness are compensated in weak-family societies by a strong tradition of civic association, where people form groups, clubs, and societies for the most varied purposes. The number and variety of these associations in England or the United States would be unimaginable for a citizen of southern Europe. In weak-family societies the individual is able to combat loneliness by turning directly to civil society, itself largely the product of the needs and initiatives of its members, in contrast to strong-family societies where the family comes between the individual and civil society, meeting a large part of the needs stemming from loneliness.
 

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Worthwhile Reading & Viewing

What archaeologists are finding in the lost city of Heracleion

10 qualities of exceptional interviewers

Is too much collaboration hurting worker productivity?

12 old words that survived by getting fossilized in idioms

Some photos of the New York subway being built

How typeface can influence the believability of written communications

How a kids’ clothing consignment business…started as a small home business and now operating in 22 states…is being threatened by mindless government regulation

Speaking of government regulation…Indiana man faces possible jail time for nursing a bald eagle back to health

Another fine photo essay from Bill Brandt: in the footsteps of Hemingway

Paintings that look like photos. More photo-realistic artwork here. (via Don Sensing)

On the failure to learn from history

From Ancient Grudge

(On the occasion of the upcoming 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and a number of news stories of the Civil War reenactment events going on all this week – an essay on the Civil War from my own archives.)

“From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”

When I was deep in the midst of researching and writing the Adelsverein Trilogy, of course I wound up reading a great towering pile of books about the Civil War. I had to do that – even though my trilogy isn’t really about the Civil War, per se. It’s about the German settlements in mid-19th century Texas. But for the final volume, I had to put myself into the mind of a character who has come home from it all; weary, maimed and heartsick – to find upon arriving (on foot and with no fanfare) that everything has changed. His mother and stepfather are dead, his brothers and many friends have all fallen on various battlefields and his sister-in-law is a bitter last-stand Confederate. He isn’t fit enough to get work as a laborer, and being attainted as an ex-rebel soldier can’t do the work he was schooled for before the war began. This was all in the service of advancing my story of how great cattle baronies came to be established in Texas and in the West, after the war and before the spread of barbed wire, rail transport to practically every little town and several years of atrociously bad winters. So are legends born, but to me a close look at the real basis for the legends is totally fascinating and much more nuanced – the Civil War and the cattle ranching empires, both.

Nuance; now that’s a forty-dollar word, usually used to imply a reaction that is a great deal more complex than one might think at first glance. At first glance the Civil War has only two sides, North and South, blue and grey, slavery and freedom, sectional agrarian interests against sectional industrial interests, rebels and… well, not. A closer look at it reveals as many sides as those dodecahedrons that they roll to determine Dungeons and Dragons outcomes. It was a long time brewing, and as far as historical pivot-points go, it’s about the most single significant one of the American 19th century. For it was a war which had a thousand faces, battlefronts and aspects.

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