sisu

"Here I am, with my peeps at last"

Day-dee (Daisy), Susie's booful little girl kitty wanted the shrimp but managed only to grab a piece of the lettuce from the doib tray this afternoon at a lovely ladies' luncheon with guest speaker (Tuck) down Newburyport. Our sis has been spiffing up the kitchen, and there were rave reviews for her three or four coats of emerald green paint on the tired old floor (see below). She's thinking of rose-colored walls, but we're thinking she should go with something light, some version of white -- of which there are zillions. The green floor and wainscoting are like the green of the earth, and the walls and ceiling should be light, like the sky. Well, that's just our landscape architectural background and our "good eye" speaking about something we call a sense of place.

"And so that's why, when bloggers get together, there's often a certain 'here I am, with my peeps at last' feeling wafting through the air; a real zest and zing," writes our precious neo re last night's meeting of the sub rosa group over cocktails and dinner at a Thai restaurant in Brookline's Coolidge Corner:

Is blogging a calling? That's way too pretentious a way to look at it. But sometimes I feel that, for most bloggers, we didn't choose blogging so much as blogging chose us. And, for most of us, it's a labor of love, requiring us to do work without a great deal of remuneration -- except, of course, for the wonderful rewards of saying one's piece and even being heard and responded to in thoughtful and meaningful ways.

And now, with blogs, we don't have to bore our friends and relatives silly -- we can entertain each other.

'Course we are blessed with Goomp, our own venerable pater who reads and comments daily, not to mention those other members of the extended family who by choice remain anonymous but are known to read from time to time if not comment. As we said to one of our fellow peeps last night, we can't use the "f" word or any of those other disagreeable expressions, even if we wanted to -- and we don't -- as our father and our dear departed mother are looking over our shoulder.

The totally awesome and lovable Jeff Jacoby (above) -- op ed writer par excellence hired away from our local conservative rag, The Boston Herald, a few years back to fill the token conservative chair in the otherwise all-blue-state-all-the-time Little Gray Lady, The Boston Globe -- was there on the sidewalk outside the restaurant last night as we arrived to meet our peeps. Starstruck, we introduced ourselves and mentioned that catblogging was right up there with political commentary and media criticism here at sisu. He blessed us with a heartbreaking story of his family's recent loss of an old and beloved kitty cat that his wife had known longer than she had her husband. Mark Twain said it best . . . 'Can't seem to find the quotation, but it had to do with the awfulness of the difference between our own and feline life spans.

Daisy accents Susie's beautiful new emerald-green kitchen floor in the mid-afternoon light streaming through the window.

We couldn't resist our adorable blogpal Teresa's take on last night:

As usual, put some bloggers together and the conversation is incredible. Solomonia does all the slog work of emailing and setting up time and place -- wonderful job he does too. Also attending were Sissy Willis and her wonderful husband Tuck, Harry Forbes, Richard Landes, Miss Kelly, neo-neocon, and New England Republican.

We especially liked that part about "her wonderful husband Tuck."

Daisy among the folded napkins, backlit by the sun, with classic daylillies from Susie's garden.

Marybeth of Miss Kelly was the one who had the cajones to ask Jeff to join us. She loves animals, plants and all things bright and beautiful. She's a keeper, big time.

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true. I'm half crazy all for the love of you.

Cutie pie Sol of Solomonia invites all of our fellow New England bloggers to "come on down," as Ernie Boch used to say, for the next meeting, about a month from now. Here's his lovely take on last night:

Jeff's a great guy. Very down to earth, and hearty thanks to him and to everyone else for showing up. If you're a local blogger (in shooting distance of Boston) who'd like to be included in future meetups, drop me a line.

There are a couple of cookouts in the works out there. You don't want to miss 'em.

"A new and more terrible servitude"

"He must have never known cats," we feverishly scrawled in the margins of Aussie scholar Keith Windschuttle's The Killing of History back in our snail-blogging days in the summer of '96. We were referring to postructuralist Jacques Derrida's anti-Enlightenment "texturalist" approach to the notion that "there is no such thing as a fixed meaning." Try telling that to Tiny and Baby -- above, chowing down yesterday afternoon -- when they hear the words "Want your suppers?"

"A political culture that is in denial about a serious social problem will condemn those who seek to discuss it and try its best to silence them," the great British political philosopher Roger Scruton told members of a "Euroskeptic" party audience in Belgium recently [Brussels Journal via Milt's File]:

By denying a problem you prevent its discussion, until discussion is too late. Throughout the thirties the European political élite lived in denial over German re-armament. By the time the truth could no longer be hidden, it was impossible to deter Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia. Reflecting on such examples it is surely reasonable to conclude that we have a duty now to brave the charge of ‘racism and xenophobia’, and to discuss every aspect of immigration. We owe this not just to the indigenous people of Europe, but to the immigrants themselves, who have just as great an interest in peaceful coexistence as the rest of us.

"Beginning in 1987," writes Roger Kimball in his 1996 The New Criterrion review of Keith Windschuttle's The Killing of History, "with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, a small but steady stream of books and articles have appeared to take issue with one or another dimension of the academic assault on truth." Our former employer, The Art Institute of Boston (founded in 1912 as The School of Practical Art), celebrated its 75th anniversary in 1987, and as head of publicity, we were responsible for lining up a big-name speaker for the big celebration. We don't remember who finally ended up on the podium, but the Institute's predictably politically-correct dean of faculty must have been relieved when our first choice, Allan Bloom, called to say he would have loved to do it but was previously booked.

Scruton summed up the dynamics of denial by recalling his own experience twenty years earlier:

Reading some of the attacks on the Vlaams Belang [the Belgian party Scruton was addressing], I cannot help recalling the time, twenty years ago, when I too was accused of ‘racism and xenophobia’ by the left-liberal media in Britain, and was forced to run the gauntlet of disgrace by my university colleagues. My offence was to have argued, through the Salisbury Review which I edited, and through my weekly column in the London Times, that the official policy of ‘multiculturalism’ was a mistake, and that the future of Britain depends not on encouraging immigrants to live apart in cultural ghettoes, but on integrating them into a common culture of nationhood. The very same liberal establishment that reacted then with outrage to my arguments, has since quietly accepted them, and the received view today is that we need a culture of Britishness, in which all our citizens can share.

On this side of the pond, we haven't noticed much "quiet acceptance" of the argument that multiculturalism was a mistake, but we're on the case. Meanwhile, why do they [intellectuals on the Left] hate us [the West]? Scruton continues:

This repudiation of the national idea is the result of a peculiar frame of mind that has arisen throughout the Western world since the Second World War, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political elites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognized: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’ and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours.’ I call the attitude oikophobia [ecophobia] -- the aversion to home -- by way of emphasizing its deep relation to xenophobia, of which it is the mirror image. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested . . . and this has often made them willing agents of foreign powers.

Scruton never puts his finger on exactly the source of the arrested development of so many intellectuals on the left, but Australian historian Keith Windschuttle does in The Killing of History -- published for American audiences in 1996 --  when he writes that the "postmodern intellectual still wants to be the centre of attention, just like all the radical intellectuals who have gone before him" (p. 130). Let's give the last word to Roger Kimball, who said of Windschuttle's work:

Although published by an obscure house (a fact that tells us a great deal about the priorities of academic publishing today), this is the most important work of cultural criticism to have appeared all year -- indeed, in many a year . . .

But at a time when what Windschuttle calls “the return of tribalism” threatens many parts of the world with a descent into barbarism, to embrace cultural relativism is also to embrace the “charnal house politics” that have brought such misery and destruction to Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Central Africa, the Balkans, and elsewhere. This indeed is where the arcane theories of Derrida, Foucault, and their epigoni collide with the real world. They abandon the constraints of empirical truth in the name of liberation. But what they wind up with is not freedom but a new and more terrible servitude.

That was written five years before 9/11, but back then, the powers that be weren't connecting the dots.

Update: Multiculturalism, no. Multispeciesism, yes, at Modulator's 93rd Friday Ark.

Oil on troubled waters

"No matter what scenario you play out, regime change or lifting sanctions, oil will flow to the US from Iraq, wrote Amy Myers Jaffe, a senior analyst at the James A Baker III Institute for Public Policy in Houston in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. "You know why? Because we have millions of soccer moms in four-wheel-drive cars," she quipped, belying the Bush-bashing blood-for-oil mantra that will be on the lips of MoveOn devotees at a gas station near you tomorrow during coordinated rallies across the nation for an "Oil-Free Congress." (Telegraph map shows known Iraqi oil fields, gas fields and pipelines as of March 18, 2003)

"We need to seize this moment to make sure the media and the public know that the Republican addiction to oil money is keeping gas prices high and holding America back from the clean energy future that we desperately need," emails economics-challenged Nita Chaudhary, inviting us to join a MoveOn "gas station rally" in our area tomorrow:

Gas prices are off the charts, the situation in the Middle East is unstable, scientists are warning that global warming is at a tipping point, and last month, MoveOn members decided that "clean, sustainable energy" should be one of our key goals. That's why it's time for an "Oil-Free Congress."

On Wednesday, June 28th -- right before the 4th of July when gas prices will be front and center as folks plan for the long weekend -- we're going to be holding gas station rallies across the country.

"Iraqi oil production has slumped from 3.5 million barrels a day before 1990 to some two million barrels now," reported the Telegraph on March 18, 2003, just two days before the invasion.

Would it be heartless to point out that gas prices reflect supply and demand, as well as the situation in the Middle East -- which, depending upon your  perspective, has been unstable for between 80 and 1000 years -- and the jury on global warming is still out? We're not sure what an "Oil-Free Congress' would look like, but the freeing up of oil in Iraq is another story, as CNN reports [via The American Mind]:

Oil production in Iraq has hit its highest level since former leader Saddam Hussein was ousted in 2003. Production has risen to 2.5 million barrels per day (bpd) from a steady 2 million bpd during the US-led invasion, Iraq's new oil minister said. Hussain al-Shahristani added that production was expected to rise to 2.7 million bpd by the end of the year.

"We have been able to break records," he said of the government, which has been in place for just over a month. Before the war, output was around 3 million bpd, peaking at a record of 3.5 million bpd.

Mr Shahristani said that Iraq's target now was to challenge Saudi Arabia's position as the world's leading oil producer.

Can you say strategery? Other than the BDS sufferers who said it was going to be a quagmire before they said it should have been a piece of cake if only the President had had a plan, nobody said it was going to be easy changing the political dynamics of this land of festering hatreds, ancient and modern. But GW's got Iran squeezed between Iraq and a hard place (Afghanistan), Iraq's new, duly-elected government is finally up and running, and now this. We can't help but think the Iraqis themselves and their elected leaders are sensing their role as children of destiny. The big news in Iraq -- if not in our own press -- yesterday was that "seven militant groups announced their desire to join the political process in accordance with the reconciliation project and said they were ready to enter a truce and stop the violence." Mohammed of Iraq the Model's take:

So far, everybody in Iraq feels good about Maliki's plan and expressed their hopes for it to meet success and ease the suffering of the Iraqi people; everybody except for the Sadrists and the association of Muslim scholars who both criticized the plan and said it wasn't acceptable and expected it to fail.

The question is are they expecting it to fail only because they think it is not framed in a workable way or because they wish for it to fail?

 I'm afraid the latter is the likely answer.

Again, nobody said it was going to be easy. We agree with Wretchard of The Belmont Club that "Maliki is probably trying to get momentum going, and the only way to do that is to work on the weakest links of the insurgency first." Meanwhile, more oil-related news back stateside:

The prosecutor in the first federal U.S. trial over the U.N. oil-for-food program said on Tuesday he would show evidence of cash-stuffed envelopes, intrigue and back-channel communication with Baghdad.

Prosecutor Michael Farbiarz laid out his case during opening arguments at the trial of South Korean lobbyist Tongsun Park, who is accused of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the scandal-ridden oil-for-food program.

We'll take the unraveling of Oil-for-Food over rallies for an Oil-Free Congress any day.

"I shall never buy the New York Times again"

The Sunday TImes reports, you decide: "People look at the lobster and try to imagine what its experience would be like, but they don't look at a package of chicken breasts and imagine what the experience would be like," said Jay Weinstein, a Manhattan caterer whose book "The Ethical Gourmet" was published this month. "It's because they're closer to the final step of the killing."

"Authority has drained from journalism for a reason. Too many of its practitioners have been easily exposed as poseurs," wrote Hugh Hewitt last January re the pipe dreams of Columbia School of Journalism's new dean, Nicholas Lemann, blogged here the other day. Now we learn in imail this afternoon that the popular imagination may have reached critical mass. More on that in a moment,* but first, here's what Hugh wrote a coupla months back, summing up what Glenn Reynolds's Army of Davids -- not to mention protobloggers like ourselves way back when -- have known for years:

There is too much expertise, all of it almost instantly available now, for the traditional idea of journalism to last much longer. In the past, almost every bit of information was difficult and expensive to acquire and was therefore mediated by journalists whom readers and viewers were usually in no position to second-guess.

The tipping point approaches in the wake of the New York Times's recent lemming-like rush over the edge. ScrappleFace gets it just right:

A secret New York Times program for fighting ‘the war on the war on terror’ represents a “radical expansion of executive editor authority” according to a legal analyst who studied the parameters of the “intel sifting and sharing program” that the Times uses to disseminate U.S. national security information to international terror groups.

Unhindered by the courts or the Congress, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller continues his campaign for greater personal power to unilaterally prosecute the anti-anti-terror battle, according to the unnamed analyst.

*Here's what makes us think we've reached the tipping point, a life-changng moment from our imail correspondent:

She: Here's a MAMS [Me and my show] for you. Even though it was an Acrostic Sunday . . . I shall never buy the NYT again.

We: YES!!! You finally came to your senses.

She: This latest round of treason has done me in. Literally, it was a point of critical mass. I really WANTED to do a puzzle and an Acrostic, but at what selling-out-to-the enemy price?

We: You have done the right thing for God and country.

She: It's thrilling to see them exposed, although the exposure may take a long time. Look how long it took me.

We: Yes, but again . . . Critical mass. The tipping point.

She: Yes, and also surface tension.

What about it, Ann Althouse? We note from a couple of posts of late that our esteemed blog friend is still shelling out to the Times to feed her puzzle habit. Time to just say no?

Update: Allah has the must-watch video of GW's response and relevant links at Hot Air:

I haven’t seen him this angry . . . ever, really. Maybe prosecutions aren’t that unlikely.

We don't know about prosecutions, but the sight and sound of the President's righteous indignation are good for the soul.

"I think it's adorable that Tuck is able to thread your needles."

Tiny meeps the English Ivy that grows unchecked up onto the western wall of the house next door. Not good for a shingled house to be covered by a rampant -- albeit beautiful -- vine. Moisture accumulates between plant and wall to the eventual deterioration of the wall. The house used to be owned and well maintained by our beloved ailurophilic neighbors Eddie and Rose, but they are long gone now, and no one seems to be looking after the place.

"You are reading like a 14 year old," Goomp's ophthalmologist told the Energizer-Bunny octogenarian -- and he wasn't referring to reading comprehension --  when our Papa went for a follow-up visit last year in connection with his cataract surgeries -- five years apart, starting ten years ago, on both eyes -- as he reports in comments to our previous post, "through a lens darkly."

Cats see things we don't, of course, and Tiny never disappoints.

"You will be happy with the results," comments blog friend Tara:

My father had the operation 5 years ago and he was thrilled with the results.

"Celebrate the fact that you can have this done relatively quickly here in America," adds the ever wise and witty Teresa:

Sometimes surgery is the better alternative. Especially since we don't want you going blind. :-)

More wit and wisdom from our imail correspondent this afternoon:

She: Did you go ahead and make an appointment?
We: No. Will wait till Monday.
She: I love how Dad is in the vanguard of "procedures." He's wicked brave, on that score.
We: Never do today what you can put off till Monday.
She: Is it really like looking through a glass darkly?
We: No. Like having a white cloud . . .
She: So, things look "milky"?
We: Yes. Good word. Try closing your eye part way . . . Like that.
She: I think it's adorable that Tuck is able to thread your needles, since, historically, he and David had the worst eyesight in the family.

We used to be so proud and superior in the God-given 20-20 vision of our youth. One of our all-time favorite things ever was to be the first one to spot a buoy predicted by the charts in real time on the horizon while under sail on our own bottom in the waters off the New England Coast. Fascinating to be the one in the family now with the worst vision of all. 'Specially with our having been gifted with the thing we often humorously refer to as a "good eye" for beauty in unexpected places. 'Guess we owe it to our fans to take care of the thing at the earliest opportunity.

Update:  Pam of Pamibe in the comments says "My Mom had it done in her 80s and was very pleased with the results, I know you will be too. :)"

Update II:  You will be very much pleased with the 118th Carnival of the Cats at Pets Garden Blog.

Through a lens darkly

Babe goes to the mattresses, where we will soon join him to refresh ourselves after a strenuous day of traveling by mass transit to Boston and back during heavy rains and thunderstorms and spending 3 out of 4 hours at Mass Eye and Ear waiting, waiting, waiting. As Tuck said, "Thank God your time isn't worth anything."

"You'll shoot your eye out," says the mom in "A Christmas Story," and now the wicked awesome doc at Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary informs us the cataract in our right eye is operable and attributable to one or more of the following:

Trauma
Diabetes
Steroids
The aging process.

As we told the old boy, Tuck stopped beating us years ago, we don't have diabetes, and we've never been on steroids. That leaves the aging process. The upside was the doctor's residential sidekick's calling us -- sort of -- "young" . . . Most cataract patients are 10-20 years older than we are, while some are 10-20 years younger . . . He recommended without pressuring us that we get the thing done now while we're still in good health. Gak. Goomp had his cataracts removed, one after the other in succession, about ten years ago and loved the results. The procedure costs $10,000, but for you, with insurance, it's a mere $1,000.

That's where we're at. It's the most successful and most performed operation in the nation, if not the universe, says Doc Matthew F. Gardiner of Mass Eye and Ear. He performs eye surgery every Wednesday and has the elegant hands of a surgeon. They make a small cut, remove the cloudy lens and then insert a new, improved artificial lens. 'Guess it's time to bite the bullet. We could be in a bed on the sixth floor at MEEI by mid August with local anesthesia and intravenous fluids. You go in early morning, have the thing done and then go home that afternoon with a patch over the offending eye and a follow-up appointment the next day. 'Hate the thought of it, but seeing through a glass darkly, as we have been through the right eye of late, is no picnic, especially for a visual artist like ourselves. As Goomp always says, getting old is not for the faint of heart. You could lose an eye, but the success rate is 95%.

This morning as we were preparing to resew a button on the little robin's-egg-blue linen blouse we intended to wear to our appointment, we had a horrifying We-R-JuJu moment. JuJu was our beloved Grammy, Mummy's mother who thought the sun rose and set on her little Sissikins up until we hit puberty. In her later years -- she lived to be 92 -- Grammy used to ask us to thread needles for her so she could mend this and that. Her eyesight was fading, so she couldn't see well enough to thread them herself. This morning we found ourselves unable to thread a needle to resew a button on that little linen blouse . . . 'Had to ask Tuck to do it for us. Sigh.

Trust but verify

Sai Mai, a Royal Bengali tigress born in captivity at the Sriracha Tiger Zoo 50 miles east of Bangkok, was breast-fed by a female pig for four months after her birth. Check out the zoo site for a thumbnail of a sow nursing a trio of tiger cubs. Did you know that grunting triggers release of the milk? So we were told by the supervisor of a provincial farm in Nova Scotia once upon a time, who informed us, when we asked, that "The pigs are in the piggery." We're wondering whether purring plays a similar role with cats? Our imail correspondent reports that for her as a new mother the triggering mechanism was a glass of wine. Thanks to blogfriend Amba of AmbivaBlog for finding the peaceable-kingdom story.

The Sriracha Tiger Zoo in Thailand "is trying to boost visitor numbers by teaching domestic animals such as pigs, and wild animals such as tigers, to live together in harmony from an early age," according to the Animal Liberation Front (ALF!). Kumbaya, anyone? It does make for fab photo ops (above) but doesn't prepare the piggies for real life. Let's hope they never have to fend for themselves beyond the protective bubble of their zoo enclosure. 'Reminds us of those overprotected persons of the left we wrote about yesterday who've spent so much time in their echo chambers of self-appointed elites inside the Beltway, in the Ivory Tower and in the MSM that they're unable to mount a serious challenge to the conservative opposition.

Having been breast-fed by her birth mother, Sweet Pea, through the golden days of an idyllic kittenhood -- her father Sluggo used to hang around with Mom, Uncle Bertie and the youngsters, Tiny and Baby, during lazy summer days on the terrace -- Tiny wouldn't dream of socializing with a mouse or vole or small bird or any species that are her natural prey.

Then, too, even miniature tigers like Tiny and Baby have been known to make mistakes, as we were just telling Ann Althouse today in the comments to her post "Cat bite," where she writes "I recommend not trusting cats, even if you know them, even if they sprawl at your feet in the pet-me-please-pet-me posture." Speaking from experience, we suggested she "trust but verify." We would offer the same advice to those cute little pigs in the Sriracha Zoo.

Update:  Like the folks at the Sriracha Zoo, Steve at Modulator is trying to boost visitor numbers by teaching animals of every stripe to live together in harmony at the 92nd Friday Ark.

How now! A rat?*

"The leftist utopian dream was doomed from the start because it denied the economic logic of nature and human nature," we wrote last year, citing the work of blind paleontologist Geerat Vermeij, who "reads the embattled history of a snail in the dents and damage to its shell . . . mollusks appear to have evolved ever more rugged armor to protect their delicate flesh just as their predators developed more vicious weaponry . . . Everyone is affected mostly by their enemies." Recent rat studies reaffirm that when it comes to enemies, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Baby and Tiny, above keeping cool at Goomp's on Father's Day, conduct ongoing rat studies of their own.

You've probably heard about the rat studies that suggest -- as the New York Times headline writer put it -- "Dirty Better Than Clean":

Gritty rats and mice living in sewers and farms seem to have healthier immune systems than their squeaky clean cousins that frolic in cushy antiseptic labs, two studies indicate.

Extrapolating to our species:

The studies give more weight to a 17-year-old theory that the sanitized Western world may be partly to blame for soaring rates of human allergy and asthma cases and some autoimmune diseases, such as Type I diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. The theory, called the hygiene hypothesis, figures that people's immune systems aren't being challenged by disease and dirt early in life, so the body's natural defenses overreact to small irritants such as pollen.

It was something in the NYT article that set our crackpot-authority antennae abristle:

When the immune cells in the wild rats are stimulated by researchers, ''they just don't do anything, they sit there; if you give the same stimulus to the lab rats, they go crazy,'' said study co-author Dr. William Parker . . . He said what happened in the lab rats is what likely occurs in humans: their immune systems have got it so cushy they overreact to the smallest of problems.

Yes! That explains the inexplicable pronouncements of late on the part of John "Blue Falcon" Murtha and other -- in Dr. Sanity's memorable versification [to be sung to the tune of "My favorite things" -- "Democrat leaders who froth and who blather, MSM marxists and Mapes and Dan Rather," together with assorted Kos Kids and fellow sufferers of Bush Derangement Syndrome desperate to snatch defeat from you know where. As with the immune-cell response of lab rats in sterile surroundings, with these mollycoddled** fellow Americans in their Pauline-Kael bubbles, the mere thought of the 43rd President of the United States causes them to "go crazy." From our "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open'" post of last year:

**Leftists have become soft and flabby in their thinking over the last 20, 30 or more years because their fellow travelers in the mainstream media -- supposed to be keeping them honest -- have been giving them a free ride, even as thinkers of the right, not enjoying such reflexive support, have been honing our debating and intellectual survival skills. That leaves the left soft and lazy and the right battle ready.

Our recent analysis of the Kossacks is equally applicable to their "betters" on the left side of the aisle inside the Beltway and in the editorial boardrooms of the MSM:

[They] don't seem to have any ideas beyond Bush hatred and "taking back" the country. It's all about power, with "a core message" as an afterthought, a far cry from the conservative message, honed through decades of thoughtful debate and research.

Beyond having become soft and flabby and reflexive in their thinking, our friends of the left have hobbled not only themselves but all of us through the insidious imposition of their fear-society-lite politically correct groupthink that has rendered many of our leaders afraid to call an Islamist terrorist an Islamist terrorist -- preferring to cast them instead as Gramscian victims of Western imperialism (All about Oil™) -- lest they themselves be accused of racism or worse. As we wrote a couple of years back:

Goomp always said the road to Hell was paved with good intentions.  One would have thought that the fall of Communism had taught us once and for all -- even those persons of the left still desperately clinging to their youthful embrace of Rousseau's pipe dream of the Noble Savage -- that you can't fool Mother Nature. There are certain laws of human nature that will always out. Incentives are all. Reward anti-social behavior by telling the perpetrator he's a victim of society and it isn't his fault, and like any infant he'll keep on behaving badly.

Back to that NYT headline: "Dirty Better Than Clean." It resonates.

Update: How now! A cat -- a lot of cats -- at the superb117th Carnival of the Cats, with lots of pics of a certain "bad kittycat," at Mind of Mog.

*"How now? A rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!" -- Hamlet (III, iv, 23)

Hats of a summer day

 

When you've got champagne bottles and umbrella crankers in the foreground, who needs fig leaves? We will never tell, and no one could ever tell for sure the identities of the wise and witty gals and guys who traveled to Camelot this sunny afternoon to pay tribute to the Goomp on his 62nd Father's Day.

Then there's Tuck. If the hat makes the man, there's no mistaking our man. As we've said before, he's a keeper. It's too late to go under cover.

A pretty girl is like a melody. Our fellow weird sister is a woman of many hats.

For the people the big aluminum bowl was where you threw your discarded lobster shells and corn cobs. For Tiny it was where you went for post prandial treats.

Baby demonstrates #3 on the Catfort Scale on this hot, humid late-spring afternoon.

Goomp's Purrky -- Mr. Perkins -- treed earlier this afternoon by an unruly neighborhood rug rat, cuddles up to alpha cat Goomp, the best friend a cat ever had.

You can't lose for winning

Father's Day Eve on the terrace at Camelot-by-the-Sea. Martinis and grilled marinated steaks with Kayem (Chelsea made) dogs and Sissy's Superb Potato Salad. Goomp, never disappointing, claims it's the best steak he's ever had. Meanwhile (above), Tiny has her eye on the prize (dogs and steaks on a platter off screen to the left).

Our favorite read of the day that says it all is the WSJ's "Mad Dogs and Englishmen." We caught it early morning just before we hit the road down east and sent a link to Goomp, who picked it up later on in his snail copy of the Journal:

With Great Britain now the world's most violent developed country, the British government has hit upon a way to reduce the number of cases before the courts: Police have been instructed to let off with a caution burglars and those who admit responsibility for some 60 other crimes ranging from assault and arson to sex with an underage girl. That is, no jail time, no fine, no community service, no court appearance. It's cheap, quick, saves time and money, and best of all the offenders won't tax an already overcrowded jail system.

Meanwhile,

Not everyone will be treated so leniently. A new surveillance system promises to hunt down anyone exceeding the speed limit. Using excessive force against a burglar or mugger will earn you a conviction for assault or, if you seriously harm him, a long sentence. Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer jailed for killing one burglar and wounding another during the seventh break-in at his rural home, was denied parole because he posed a threat to burglars. The career burglar whom Mr. Martin wounded got out early.

When you enjoy being a cat, it's no good unless you enjoy being a cat all the way. Tiny does it in spades.

Then there's Brit crit Melanie Philips's "All must have prizes" phenomenon [via Clive Davis], not to mention those 41 valedictorians of Fairfax's Robinson Secondary School [via Ann Althouse] on this side of the pond. It got us to thinking and remembering. This Gramscian incursion has been infiltrating our educational system for some time now. The same phenomenon burst full blown upon our unsuspecting consciousness perhaps 20 years ago, when a Boston public-school contest sponsored by our employer at the time, the Art Institute of Boston, made a big point of "awarding" all the losers with an "I participated" sticker -- as if the kids were stupid enough to think participation was as good as achievement. The City Hall coordinator, having swallowed the p.c. party line, insisted upon it. The winners -- one from each of four age groups -- got to have their designs printed and sold as "holiday" greeting cards during the unmentionable Christmas season. The contest itself was mighty bless, but even then the Gramscian soul killers were in control, demanding that all were winners and Christmas was the holiday that dare not speak its name.