Dakota Pipeline Protesters

The truth never comes out when it can make a difference, but I guess it's good that it comes out at some point.

From today's WSJ in regard to the Dakota pipeline protesters causing more environmental damage than what they are purporting to fix.

The Army Corps closed the area and said in a press release that grass has been destroyed or removed from some 50 acres. The mess has to be cleared out before a spring flood sends toxic sludge into the nearby Cannonball River and Lake Oahe, the same lake the protesters said would be polluted by the pipeline. Moral grandstanding can be a dirty business

A Nice Young Man For a Small Tea Party

I was reading an interesting history last night about the Siege of Paris by one of my favorite historians, Alistair Horne, where he mentioned a French phrase, "petit creves", in reference to problems with some of the young men of Paris joining private 'medical' units and disappearing from being able to fight.

Most of the French phrases Horne uses I'm able to figure out or type into Google Translate and get the gist of what he's saying.  In this case I knew petit was small, but had no idea what creves was.  Here's the results from this particular search.

Google Translate didn't help much since I don't know what the punches idiom means in French.  Luckily there was a footnote on the phrase that said a petit creves was best described by the English phrase "A nice young man for a small tea-party"

Although I thought I knew what the phrase meant from the context, it was still pretty obscure.   I did some searches for it and found the following from a book published in 1885.

What a great phrase!  It's very interesting to see dialog from over one hundred years ago describing things I've personally discussed.  It's also interesting to see that the human condition never really changes.

It also shows the richness that can be added to your reading by taking the effort to look things up you don't understand.  I can't wait to use this phrase in a sentence.

Idea of the Day

If the Democrat hacks in the Senate don't confirm Betsy DeVos, Trump  should shut down the Dept. Of Education. That's what I call a win-win situation

Socialism Truth Bomb from WSJ

From historian Alan Charles Kors’s “Can There Be an ‘After Socialism’?” for the Atlas Society, Sept. 27, 2003:

No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: “No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into.” . . .

To be moral beings, we must acknowledge these awful things appropriately and bear witness to the responsibilities of these most murderous times. Until socialism—like Nazism or fascism confronted by the death camps and the slaughter of innocents—is confronted with its lived reality, the greatest atrocities of all recorded human life, we will not live “after socialism.”

It will not happen. The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with the culture—free markets and individual rights—that has produced the greatest alleviation of suffering; the greatest liberation from want, ignorance, and superstition; and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in the history of all human life.

This pathology allows Western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies of the victims of Communism without a tear, a scruple, a regret, an act of contrition, or a reevaluation of self, soul, and mind.

Should We Have Gone Into Iraq?

Ann Coulter nails the answer to this one.

[Megan] Kelly [from Fox news] asked Bush: "Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion [of Iraq]?" 

The correct answer is: 

Now that we know that a half-century of Teddy Kennedy's 1965 Immigration Act would result in a country where a man like Barack Obama could be elected president, and then, purely out of antipathy to America, would withdraw every last troop from Iraq, nullifying America's victory and plunging the entire region into chaos, no, I would not bother removing dangerous despots in order to make America safer.

Instead, I would dedicate myself to overturning our immigration laws, ending the anchor-baby scam and building a triple-layer fence on the border, so that some future Republican president could invade Iraq without worrying about a foreign-elected president like Obama coming in and giving it away.

Wow.  The question can't be answered better than that.

Peacniks and their motivation

Great quote from "Catch the Jew" by Tuvia Tennenbaum in regard to a Leftist Jew who heartily supported the Palestinians.

"Peace is this man's God, but I think he's an atheist"

I think this explains a lot Leftist "useful idiots" actions. 

Use your strength to do bold things....

I heard this quote from Machiavelli this morning and liked it so much I had to make a blog entry to make sure I didn't lose it. 

All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.Niccolò Machiavelli

I especially liked the last line about developing strength to do bold things and not use it to stand up to suffering.  I've fallen into this trap and was happy to see the problem so artfully articulated.

I also like the statement that all courses of action are risky.  I've fought against the urge to be "safe" and giving up my ambitions.  So far, I'm happy with the result.