RedStateEclectic

Tea for Two

I'm having a lovely tea break. Take one, too, and have a tea, maybe for two.

The tune in 1927:

 

And in 1978:

 

See also My Cup of Tea, and Richard Wagner - Your Cup of Tea?

Idioms

The source.

Out of the frying pan into the fire - the German equivalent is: out of the rain into the gutter - vom Regen in die Traufe.

What could come closer to the opposite of the English idiom than staying out of the slaughterhouse to end up in a frozen swimming pool.

Tomorrow, I Write (Something)

Wednesday is the day.  While Georg continues to post here on a near daily (or multi-times a day) basis, I’ve been slacking off.

Tomorrow, after I get a good night’s sleep, I’ll put fingers to keyboard and finish one or two of the posts I’ve been thinking about.  Of course I’ve got to grade papers and do some laundry, as well.

Things I’m thinking about lately:

• The National Debt and the immorality of what we’re doing to our kids (notice, I’ve added a running debt clock to the top left of our page).
• Gun control, and the threats of confiscation
• Sequestration (really? We’re supposed to think that having a little bit less of an increase than planned for—still above and beyond last years’ budget—is going to cause something akin to the zombie apocalypse?)
• Losing our rights

Oh, and on that note, here’s a video that was brought to my attention today:

I’m not really sure that I’d have the nerve to challenge the authorities that directly—especially not if my kids were in the car.  In many instances, it seems like it would be easier to just say, “yes, I’m an American citizen” and show them my driver’s license.  But I understand the frustration, and hope that I would stand my ground if justified.

LLE

Letter to Charles Darwin

The older I get, the more I cherish the experience of getting closer to the truth by being wrong at a considerable rate.

The amazing thing about this story, Charles, is that not a jot of it was known even when I was a boy, let alone you. There is something almost miraculously exciting about the way we can recover and relive the past adventures of the planet in glorious detail thanks to modern science.

You once wrote, in a letter to your sister from the Falkland Islands in 1834, of the pleasure of "finding a fine group of fossil bones, which tell their story of former times with almost a living tongue." Today, almost 180 years later, the fossils, isotopes and spores not only speak softly of slow and gradual changes but cry out the story of a violent and truly terrible catastrophe that once transformed life on Earth.

Read the articles here and here.

Reverie

I was wondering how to translate "Träumerei" into English. Consulting the dictionary, I discovered the German word is accurately reflected in these meanings of the English term reverie:

1. a state of dreamy meditation or fanciful musing: lost in reverie.

2. a daydream.

3. a fantastic, visionary, or impractical idea: reveries that will never come to fruition.

4. Music. an instrumental composition of a vague and dreamy character.

The source.

 

Image credit.

Are Bling Gold Parties a Sign of a Bubble?

Over cards last night someone mentioned they knew a friend who had hosted a gold party. Having never heard of such a thing I asked for more information.

Turns out this friend ended up making $400 on just hosting fees alone where the host gets a cut of what is generated. There was $4,000 worth of gold that changed hands at the party.

Doing a simple Google search shows there is lots of activity on the Internet for these parties. Reading some of the news sites that talk about gold parties it is mainly a female party similar to the basket, Tupperware, chef, Mary Kay parties of the past. In this case, there is a buyer from a company that brings their checkbook who first tests the gold to find out how pure it is and then makes an offer with a check for the gold.

Here in Nebraska there are a couple of bills in the state legislature (LB 109 and LB 226) that try to put more restrictions on the sale and purchase of gold. These laws would certainly make it harder to conduct a gold party. Scrap metal dealers and pawnbrokers are already restricted on how they must perform a transaction with gold. The new legislation attempts to add anyone else doing the same to these restrictions. You can read more here.

As someone who saw the stock clubs spring up during the .dot com bomb which then lead into friends buying rental or fixer-upper homes before the real estate crash one has to wonder if this gold party is the sign that we've reached the top of the gold bubble?

There's a general rule I use that if it plays in Nebraska you're near the top. It might be time to move on. Reason I say that is that due to our slowness to "get it" and also the lack of population, by the time something popular comes here (a newish restaurant chain, popular musical artist in concert, clothing craze, etc.) that something has hit its peak with no growth left, i.e. no more suckers to find.

Time will tell if this is the peak of the gold bubble (chart). The money printing will never go away, but bubbles do go bust. If gold is in a bubble, then what's next?

(Note: If you get financial recommendations from blogs, please stop now and just give me your money. Also, I happen to like the fact that we don't "get it" as fast as the rest of the country. That's why we're more conservative in this state then in others. And that's fine by me.)

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Debtor-Prison Nation

Here’s an interesting, brief article written by Frank Ryan, published on The American Thinker.

Great Britain's tax rate at one point in time exceeded 70%, and as such, Great Britain experienced a great "brain drain."  Many of those citizens came to the United States.

The United States is likely to experience a similar brain drain and economic malaise if the fiscal policies of the past and present go unchecked.

The solution to the problem of creating a devastating paradox of a debtor-prison nation is to uphold the principles of our Constitution in Article 1, Sections 7 and 8 and limit the growth of the federal government.

The Repeal of the 17^th Amendment, while not likely initially, would begin the process of limiting federal government growth.

The 17^th Amendment to the Constitution diminished the rights of the states by allowing for the popular vote for the U. S. Senate, such that the stage became set to have the federal government begin to assume a role for which it was not originally intended.  This creates an environment in which states may have their financial solvency threatened by the actions of other states when the federal government becomes the lender of last resort to the insolvent states.

When a nation has such extensive debt, as in the United States, that it restricts its options for creating and fostering economic growth or prosperity for future generations, it is likely that the nation will cease to flourish as it has in our past.  Opportunities to escape to other states may be for naught if the problems are national in scope.

A significant, prolonged, and sustained economic malaise will likely occur with our current debt burden and unfunded obligations.

Only disciplined, controlled reduction in out-of-control public-sector spending will reverse this trend...which started in the 1930s.  Keynes, you opened a can of worms!

It seems to me that among the people I talk to, they either “get” the problem of our national debt, or they’re blissfully oblivious. 

LLE

Tradition

Never underestimate the dynamism of the tradition-bound. After all, there are traditions of critiquing traditions. There are traditions of maintaining traditions, and traditions of getting rid of traditions.

We are all traditionalists. Try to look at things that way, and you will be surprised ...

The below clip plays out some of the tensions that the "conservative-libertarian" Edmund Burke tried to come to grips with - as explained in Edmund Burke and the Woman on the A-Train.

The movie "Catholics" is based on one of the many great novels by Brian Moore.

 

Edmund Burke and the Woman on the A-Train

"The cloudy sky is more grand than the blue," said Edmund Burke, according to the image source.

Following up on Laura's post Conservatives and Libertarians: Uneasy Cousins, I offer the lucid - and to me highly inspiring - below lecture on the great "conservative-libertarian" thinker and politician Edmund Burke, delivered by Ian Shapiro, Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

I have always neglected "my Burke". Though, I once had a go at Conor Cruise O'Brien's magisterial biography. At the time, however, I was insufficiently prepared to cope with the onslaught of historic ideas and circumstances jumping at me from the tome.

Shapiro's presentation certainly is a paragon of clarity and concentration.

 

Allgemeinbildung

There is a monstrosity of a term in German: Allgemeinbildung - general education or educational background. What turns the German term - for me - into a monstrosity is its historical and institutional background. For Lincoln's dictum certainly holds true in the case of Germany, where homeschooling is a crime and institutions of private education are strictly content-controlled by the state:

“The philosophy of the classroom will be the philosophy of the government in the next generation.”

Nothing could be more antithetic to the idea of genuine education than a monopoly on asserting what it is.

Education is the ability to acquire, handle and advance human knowledge. For these purposes, freedom and competition are of the essence.

Instead those who ought to be protected against any kind of conscription are being conscripted into a behemoth broadcaster of prejudices - as Arthur Schopenhauer said:

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.

Robert E. Peterson at The Freeman offers an account of a far better model:

The results of colonial America’s free market system of education were impressive indeed. Almost no tax money was spent on education, yet education was available to almost anyone who wanted it, including the poor. No government subsidies were given, and inefficient institutions either improved or went out of business. Competition guaranteed that scarce educational resources would be allocated properly. The educational institutions that prospered produced a generation of articulate Americans who could grapple with the complex problems of self-government. The Federalist Papers, which are seldom read or understood today, even in our universities, were written for and read by the common man. Literacy rates were as high or higher than they are today. A study conducted in 1800 by DuPont de Nemours revealed that only four in a thousand Americans were unable to read and write legibly.

See also Sapere Aude.