Category Archives: Blogosphere

The Downton Abbey soaper

Posted on February 24, 2014 | 2 comments

I haven’t watched it more than a few minutes at a time on rare occasions. Mrs. Charm watches it religiously and seems not the least perturbed by any of it. She was sad when its season ended Sunday night, but I’m sure she’ll hunt for reruns.

I figure it is basically Upstairs Downstairs in retread, which, indeed, some critics contend. I was surprised to learn that some conservatives consider it offensive, probably for its portrayal of a society without much, if any, middle class—which is where the Democrats seem intent on taking all of us.

Terry at Sullivan’s Travelers thinks the Abbey is nothing to be concerned about:

“The political message is bien-pensant, when it can be detected at all. The way that social norms straightened the lives of women is given far greater emphasis than the way…social norms straightened the lives of men. Lord Grantham is a genuinely good-hearted person. Carson, the chief domestic, is tough, but fair. I was surprised to see the sole gay character, footman Thomas Barrow, presented as a villain (though they made him more likable by the end of season three).”

Like I say I don’t watch it, so I don’t know. I don’t generally watch the rube, anymore, except for Big 12 college football games in the fall and winter.

I remember watching Upstairs Downstairs at my ex-wife’s parents home way back when. They never missed it. They were well enough off to identify with the lords and ladies instead of the help.

Abbey apparently is just a similar soap opera in period clothes.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Mrs. Charm, Obsessions, Rancho Roly Poly, The Culture

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Election fraud in Texas

Posted on February 22, 2014 | 3 comments

Not that you would have heard much about it unless you read PJMedia and a few other outlets that take investigative journalist James O’Keefe for more than the “provocateur” the NYTimes calls him.

Provocateur means troublemaker. Trouble for the Democrat party.

“The media in Texas have done their dead-level best to ignore both of Project Veritas’ videos as long as they possibly could. When the media here do cover them, they have tended to downplay the videos’ potential significance. The [supposedly non-partisan] Texas Tribune even interviewed a Democrat election lawyer — but not a Republican one — to defend Battleground Texas’ actions seen in the Veritas video. The prevailing media opinion seems to be that, because leftwing outfits have often criticized Project Veritas, every story that it unearths is worthless or worse.”

Well, most of the reporters and editors in those outfits are leftists themselves, educated in leftist journalism mills elsewhere, who only came to Texas for a job. Their interest in the state is minimal. And, instead of competing with each other, most of the time they echo each other.

Instapundit calls them and most of their colleagues elsewhere “Democratic operatives with bylines.”

Via Instapundit.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Scribbles, Texana, The Culture

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The new culture war

Posted on February 21, 2014 | Comments Off on The new culture war

Sultan Knish (Daniel Greenfield) is one of my favorite bloggers and he’s got a good plan for how us individuals can combat the leftist takeover of government, news media, Hollywood and academia.

“The first stage of a culture war is to cease supporting the enemy. The second stage is to push back by building up your institutions that make your way of life possible. The third stage is to use those institutions against the enemy.”

In other words, the Sultan means we should stop buying the left’s newspapers and stop watching their news shows and movies and tuning into NPR-PBS and “leaving products with environmentalist tripe on the packaging on the shelf.”

Read the Sultan, Instapundit, Breitbart, and PJMedia, and patronize Fox News and the libertarian radio talker of your choice, if you’re so inclined. You could also stop attending that leftist church or synagogue. There are conservative ones available.

The left’s newspapers already are losing money and that can be extended to the other lefty news outlets some of which, like MSNBC, are said to be nearly broke. Hollywood could be wiped out by a good boycott of a dozen or so of their movies for several years running. Academia will be harder to turn but there’s already a significant trend to questioning whether a high-dollar college degree is worth it for finding a good job—it sure isn’t if you major in the so-called humanities.

The Sultan is right when he says voting simply ain’t gonna get it any more.

“Even if Republicans were to win the White House and dominate the House and the Senate, they would still face a totalitarian entity whose judges would make laws, whose media would subvert democracy, whose educational institutions and entertainment industry would reprogram the people and whose bureaucracy would undermine any decision that it did not like.”

We don’t even have a genuine two-party system anymore. Just one party, the leftist Dems and the Rhino right combined and in agreement more often than not. The Tea Party is too old and middle class and not only is being pummeled by the leftist media but is undercut by the Republican establishment as well. It’s gottta be a culture fight.

The Sultan does worry about people taking to the streets, a la Cairo and Ukraine. I doubt it very much. Even us disgruntled Americans are too comfortable to risk it all like that. And, besides, passive resistance works wonders. Millions are still refusing to sign up for ObamaCare. Even in Yankeeland Connecticut, thousands are refusing to register their guns and the state is just about powerless to do anything about it.

As Instapundit says: ” I love the people who say you could never deport all the illegals, but who think you could lock up all the gun owners.”

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Posted in Blogosphere, Evolution, Guns, The Culture

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The feds: behind the curve as usual

Posted on February 18, 2014 | 7 comments

Seventeen “years with no global warming and recent very cold winters is a troubling trend, which if it continues will result in serious problems for humanity. This will be especially true if the current obsession with global warming continues, leaving the public unprepared for cold weather events.

“Of particular concern are the warnings from solar scientists that over the next three decades, we are headed toward significant global cooling as the sun weakens into a grand minimum.”

So, instead of relying on our hapless bureaucrats and corrupt political leadership—who want to close coal-fired power plants to stop the global warming that’s already stopped on its own—it’s time for “the public” to get its own act together: plan on colder winters and adjust accordingly.

Via PJMedia.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Science/Engineering, The Culture, Weather/Climate

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Our winter almost over

Posted on February 17, 2014 | 1 comment

After four months of chilly-to-downright-cold, we finally have a week’s forecast ahead of daytime temps in the mid- to upper-70s. But LCRA meteor Bob Rose says below-normal temperatures will return for the last week of the month into the first week of March.

No precip in the offing, unlike the experience of a fellow 13th Mississippi descendant who recently bought a copy of our new book. She lives in Maine (of all places) and says they just finished shoveling eight inches of ice-crusted snow off walks and deck and had another three inches of snow over the weekend. Better them than me.

Now if the damn juniper pollen would just get the shuck out of the air. Going on eight weeks now of sneezing and nose-blowing from “cedar fever” is just too much.

If it happens again next year, I have told Mrs. Charm, I’m moving to West Texas—at least for the duration. Hole up in some boarding house (if I can find one; if they have them anymore) with WiFi until the all-clear.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Mrs. Charm, Rancho Roly Poly, Texana, Weather

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Those cowardly Republicans

Posted on February 16, 2014 | 3 comments

“Democrat seeking re-election urges IRS to get tougher on non-profit political groups.” Or something like that. The headline of a piece I saw browsing the Web but didn’t click on.

Didn’t need to. Not hard to figure out. The IRS is doing the bidding of the administration and their party, thanks to the indifference of the Democrat-oriented snooze media.

And the cowardly Republican Party. Gad, I’m fed up with those clowns. Cowardly or corrupt, take your pick. Either way they are sitting on their hands. Dropping the ball on Benghazi was bad enough. Allowing the damned IRS to be a political enforcer is insane.

Via Instapundit.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, The Culture

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Austin’s burgeoning Jewish choices

Posted on February 16, 2014 | 4 comments

The black hats—or penguins if you want to be rude—are the ultra-Orthodox of Judaism, mostly found these days in New York and Jerusalem. But a growing number can be seen daily in our hilly neighborhood on the eastern slope of Austin’s northwest plateau. They’re the surface indications of a growing Jewish population and, therefore, Jewish choices hereabouts.

There’s the proximity to the Dell Jewish Community Center half a mile or so up the road from the rancho. It mainly offers a variety of secular, reform, and conservative services. All of which many of the Haredim lump with pagans and gentiles. Although there is at least one orthodox congregation there and an orthodox  Chabad-Lubbavitch center a mile or so farther north, as well as the student one a few miles down to the southeast of the neighborhood at the University of Texas.

The kosher meat market tucked into a corner of our local H.E.B is a nicety. And, who knows, the diamond merchants amongst whom the Haredim are said to be proliferating might like to congregate. Confirmed for me by a gentile friend hereabouts who is also in the diamond trade. An unassuming fellow devoid of identifying costume except for his diamond pinky ring and the small, belt-holstered 9mm whose outlines are occasionally visible under his shirt. Hard to imagine the Haredim going armed—they’d need a concealed-carry permit from the state of course—but their permanent choice of black suit jackets would provide appropriate concealment.

Whatever the draw for Jews and their burgeoning choices hereabouts, I find the black hats comforting. I see them every Shabbat escorting their long-skirted, hair-covered wives and young children in their Saturday best, all walking in the general direction of the community center and back home again to the rental duplexes on a street a few blocks east of the rancho. But I have always been among the god obsessed, even in our seemingly secular age.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Guns, Israel, Obsessions, Rancho Roly Poly, Texana, The Culture

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