November 24, 2012

All politics is local

JHoward

There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man.

How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.

-Leo Tolstoy, “Three Methods Of Reform”, with scant mention of the 2016 GOP…

Posted by JHoward @ 5:30am
25 comments | Trackback

Comments (25)

  1. happyfeet says November 24, 2012 at 6:01 am

    as i turn up the collar on my favorite winter coat this wind is blowing in my mind

  2. @PurpAv says November 24, 2012 at 7:01 am

    Spartan, off grid, lifestyle as much as possible.

    The beast is fed by many trickling streams. ex. I made no long distance landline calls last month, but there’s a $3+ charge on my bill, over $2 of which is taxes and fees.

    I’m going to drop the copper landline long distance service and go MagicJack for long distance.

    Starve the beast…a dollar at a time.

  3. happyfeet says November 24, 2012 at 7:09 am

    people who pay cable bills are simply not serious about this idea that we should cut back how much of our monies we voluntarily hand over to obamawhores what hate america

  4. guinspen says November 24, 2012 at 7:57 am

    blowing in one
    ear and out
    the other

  5. @PurpAv says November 24, 2012 at 8:28 am

    I’ve been in this same house since 89′ when it was new and never had cable…yet I still get two or three pieces of junk mail from Comcast every month trying to get me to sign up…

    A few years ago I fired the gas company and told them to come and get their meter because they were charging $11.50 each month in taxes and fees to read the meter and send me a bill for $3 worth of actual gas product.

    I put in an electric tankless water heater, and now I don’t have to worry about the house blowing up…and its impact on the electric bill was at most a dollar or two. FPL only charges $5-6 dollars to read the meter and send the bill.

    With the $11.50 savings each month, the unit already paid for itself since I did all the electrical/plumbing work myself.

  6. Yuri says November 24, 2012 at 9:01 am

    Good quote. So I looked up other Tolstoy quotes and found this one:

    I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back. — Leo Tolstoy

    Sounds like a pretty apt description of the Left in this country.

    This Tolstoy fellow seems like a pretty sharp guy; maybe I should read his books.

  7. Yuri says November 24, 2012 at 9:03 am

    Ooh, another good one:

    Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
    Leo Tolstoy

    The man’s a treasure trove. Who knew?

  8. Yuri says November 24, 2012 at 9:16 am

    Guinspen, was your comment in regard to the targets of JHoward’s Tolstoy quote (i.e. just about everybody), or something more specific?

  9. happyfeet says November 24, 2012 at 9:41 am

    good job on the gas meter thing

  10. happyfeet says November 24, 2012 at 9:43 am

    yeah guins what on God’s green are you on about

  11. LBascom says November 24, 2012 at 11:51 am

    Thomas Sowell has some great stuff out. Some tidbits:

    Mitt Romney now joins the long list of the kinds of presidential candidates favored by the Republican establishment— nice, moderate losers, people with no coherently articulated vision, despite how many ad hoc talking points they may have.

    The list of Republican presidential candidates like this goes back at least as far as 1948, when Thomas E. Dewey ran against President Harry Truman. Dewey spoke in lofty generalities while Truman spoke in hard-hitting specifics. Since then, there have been many re-runs of this same scenario, featuring losing Republican presidential candidates John McCain, Bob Dole, Gerald Ford and, when he ran for reelection, George H.W. Bush.

    Bush 41 first succeeded when he ran for election as if he were another Ronald Reagan (“Read my lips, no new taxes”), but then lost when he ran for reelection as himself— “kinder and gentler,” disdainful of “the vision thing” and looking at his watch during a debate, when he should have been counter-attacking against the foolish things being said.

    Conventional wisdom in the Republican establishment is that what the GOP needs to do, in order to win black votes or Hispanic votes, is to craft policies specifically targeting these groups. In other words, Republicans need to become more like Democrats. [...]

    An alternative way to make inroads into the overwhelming majority of minority votes for Democrats would be for the Republicans to articulate a coherent case for their principles and the benefits that those principles offer to all Americans.

    But the Republicans’ greatest failure has been precisely their chronic failure to spell out their principles— and the track record of those principles— to either white or non-white voters.,

    Very few people know, for example, that the gap between black and white incomes narrowed during the Reagan administration and widened during the Obama administration. This was not because of Republican policies designed specifically for blacks, but because free market policies create an economy in which all people can improve their economic situation.

    The most successful Republican presidential candidate of the past half century— Ronald Reagan, who was elected and reelected with landslide victories— bore little resemblance to the moderate candidates that Republican conventional wisdom depicts as the key to victory, even though most of these moderate candidates have in fact gone down to defeat.

    One of the biggest differences between Reagan and these latter-day losers was that Reagan paid great attention to explaining his policies and values. He was called “the great communicator,” but much more than a gift for words was involved. The issues that defined Reagan’s vision were things he had thought about, written about and debated for years before he reached the White House.

    Reagan was like a veteran quarterback who comes up to the line of scrimmage, takes a glance at how the other team is deployed against him, and knows automatically what he needs to do. There is not enough time to figure it out from scratch, while waiting for the ball to be snapped. You have to have figured out such things long before the game began, and now just need to execute.

    Very few Republican candidates for any office today show any sign of such in-depth preparation on issues. Mitt Romney, for example, inadvertently showed his lack of preparation when he indicated that he was in favor of indexing the minimum wage rate, so that it would rise automatically with inflation.

    Too bad it’s too late.

  12. palaeomerus says November 24, 2012 at 1:31 pm

    “Yuri says November 24, 2012 at 9:16 am
    Guinspen, was your comment in regard to the targets of JHoward’s Tolstoy quote (i.e. just about everybody), or something more specific?”

    “happyfeet says November 24, 2012 at 9:43 am
    yeah guins what on God’s green are you on about”

    What’s that? Some blog posters NEED MY HELP SOLVING A DEVIOUS MYSTERY!! I’d better put my detective hat on and start looking for clues. Hmmmm…

    Clue 1:

    ” happyfeet says November 24, 2012 at 6:01 am
    as i turn up the collar on my favorite winter coat this wind is blowing in my mind”

    +

    Clue 2:

    ” guinspen says November 24, 2012 at 7:57 am
    blowing in one
    ear and out
    the other”

    These two posts SEEM to be LINKED! They both mention ‘blowing’ and then refer to the intellect and the cranial area, both which are sort of anatomically strongly linked in western medical tradition!

    So I think guinspen might have been referencing happyfeet’s oddly phrased post about how the wind was in his mind. By talking about the blowing going in one ear and out the other guinspen was making a humorous implication that happyfeet has no brain and his head is hollow which would allow wind to travel through two openings in opposite sides of his head unimpeded by ANY obstructing tissue that would normally be found there! By Jove, I think that must be it! Of course earn canals do not penetrate the skull though there is a passage for a nerve, but perhaps that is looking at things too formally. Humorous images and taunts often take things informally and ignore cumbersome details that might confuse the intended audience of the jape.

    PHEWWWWW!! That was one difficult puzzle to figure out. Time to mop the sweat off my brow and put my feet up. Fatigue can lead to serious medical conditions. And I wouldn’t want THAT to happen.

  13. guinspen says November 24, 2012 at 2:43 pm

    My comment regarded somefoot more specific.

  14. guinspen says November 24, 2012 at 2:44 pm

    I’m on about God’s green peas.

  15. leigh says November 24, 2012 at 2:49 pm

    Visualize whirled peas, guinspen.

  16. John Bradley says November 24, 2012 at 3:40 pm

    If you find yourself having green peas, you’re probably eating too much asparagus or something.

  17. palaeomerus says November 24, 2012 at 4:24 pm

    You didn’t cook those peas! (But you still have to eat them! )

  18. LBascom says November 24, 2012 at 5:03 pm

    I’m going eat some green pea soup laced with thanksgiving ham. ummm

  19. leigh says November 24, 2012 at 5:23 pm

    I’ve never been served a ham on Thanksgiving, just turkey. Is this some sort of abundant table thing I’ve been left out of here?

    My folks are from the Heartland, so they know from food.

  20. happyfeet says November 24, 2012 at 6:03 pm

    it’s from a song what Mr Michael Jackson used to sing back when he could breathe

  21. LBascom says November 24, 2012 at 6:14 pm

    Oh hell yes, a ham must always accompany the turkey.

    Didn’t you read Animal Farm? ;-)

  22. palaeomerus says November 24, 2012 at 6:47 pm

    Turkey -> sandwiches and soup
    Ham -> sandwiches and beans

    They are both a big roasted item. Both are available in the fall in abundance. Both are a farm tradition, if you are a protestant at least.

    We tend to do either or.

    This year I did a smallish boneless turkey breast with dressing (which is a sort of lamer version of stuffing cooked outside of the turkey) and a bone in glazed butt ham.

    The Turkey went faster but there was less of it.
    The ham is about 75% gone.
    The bone and a portion of the ham has been frozen for beans (and I have some little smokies that will go in the beans too).
    The peas are gone. I asked everyone at the table how they were and they didn’t get it. Said they were fine.
    Mashed sweet potatoes are gone.
    Cranberry sauce is gone.
    Texas Toast is gone.

    I still have some apple cobbler left.

  23. palaeomerus says November 24, 2012 at 6:48 pm

    I didn’t do the big smoked sausage this year. Sausage seems to have kind of dropped out of the rotation. Nobody mentioned it.

  24. leigh says November 24, 2012 at 6:57 pm

    I usually make another turkey for Christmas. Sort of a repeat of the Thanksgiving feast, but with birthday cake, too since my birthday is on Christmas.

    My dad always sends us one of those spiral cut hams for New Year’s. And, I just found out my step-daughter is sending us a mega-ton of crab legs from Alaska where she lives. Crab-legs are my youngest son’s favorite. Thank God it’s wrestling season and he has to make weight or he’d try to eat them all in one sitting.

    I seem to vaguely remember my grandma making a ham, too for Thanksgiving. We’re not Protestants, just a bunch of Okies, Arkies and Cornhuskers.

  25. SDN says November 26, 2012 at 10:03 am

    Down here in TX, every restaurant’s buffet will also include either prime rib or smoked beef brisket.

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