Month: January 2016

Early Snapshots of the Blizzard

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The storm should continue till around midnight tonight. Tomorrow is the Big Digout. Below is a shot of my deck, where I measured 18″ at noon on the flat (not drifted) area:

SnowNoon

Update: I measured 22″ on my deck at 4:30 PM. It’s still snowing hard and we have another eight hours to go!

Update: I measured 23″ on my deck at 11:00 PM. The snow is finished and even the wind has stopped, so the storm is over. The weather predictions were spot on for this storm. They’re getting much better at this sort of thing than they were a few decades ago. I mildly startled a young, lone deer in my yard when I opened the door to measure the snow. He looked up from nibbling on one of my bushes, looked at me quizzically and focused his ears toward me. I think he’s a young stag that got booted from his herd by the dominant stag. I’ve seen him out there alone many times. He doesn’t have a lot of weight on him, so I wonder if he’s going to survive the winter.

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National Review goes Bananas

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National Review has now gone off the deep end on Donald Trump.

This strikes me as fear and panic but about what ?

But he is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries. Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.

Cue pearl clutching. What exactly has “the broad conservative ideological consensus” achieved the past 20 years ? Personally, I think Reagan began the problem by choosing Bush for his VP. Bush was antithesis to Reagan’s message and had ridiculed his economic plans.

Sam Houston State University historian, writing on the Forbes web site, has a very odd blog post this morning. He criticizes MIT economist Simon Johnson for attributing the term “voodoo economics” to George H.W. Bush. Domitrovic calls it a “myth” that the elder Bush ever uttered those words. “You’d think there’d be a scrap of evidence dating from 1980 in support of this claim. In fact there is none,” he says.

Perhaps down in Texas they don’t have access to the Los Angeles Times. If one goes to the April 14, 1980 issue and turns to page 20, one will find an articled by Times staff reporter Robert Shogan, entitled, “Bush Ends His Waiting Game, Attacks Reagan.” Following is the 4th paragraph from that news report:

“He [Bush] signaled the shift [in strategy] in a speech here [in Pittsburgh] last week when he charged that Reagan had made ‘a list of phony promises’ on defense, energy and economic policy. And he labeled Reagan’s tax cut proposal ‘voodoo economic policy’ and ‘economic madness.'”

It’s amusing to see people try to deny facts. Some argue that Bush did not oppose “Supply side” theory. Still, that is what “Voodoo Economic Policy” referred to. What else ?

Bush promised “no new taxes” in 1988 but then raised taxes in 1990 creating or deepening a recession that cost him re-electiion and gave us Bill Clinton.

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“Professor Forrest McDonald (1927–2016): Scholar, Patriot, and Friend”

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Seth Barrett Tillman’s thoughtful remembrance of Professor McDonald:

Professor McDonald was and will remain—long into the distant future—among the most influential historians on American history, particularly in regard to the American Revolution and the Constitution’s framing era. Some people might say he was the most influential historian of his generation. He wrote for both academics and the wider public. He also was part of the recrudescence of pro-Hamiltonian scholarship—not a small achievement considering he did this while writing in 1970s U.S. academia and while teaching in the deepest South.[1] He wrote boldly, and he also experimented with new ideas about the past, including the so-called Celtic hypothesis.
 
I am not going to describe his vitae or his personal life (about which I know little). These things have been and are being done well in many other forums. Here I want to describe how kind McDonald was to me personally.

Worth reading in full.

What Are Our Stories?

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I’ve been reading The Devil’s Pleasure Palace.  The author remarks that, in the 19th century, the reading material in many American homes included Milton’s Paradise Lost.  We already knew that Shakespeare and the Bible were common reading in those days.

The author notes (and this is unarguable, I think) that a society is largely characterized by the stories and myths that it shares.

So my question for discussion is this…and I’m almost afraid to ask it…in American in 2016, what are our primary shared stories and myths?