Something Wonderful

Brett McS, who is now for all practical purposes my remote content provider, passes along this fabulous interview Neil Armstrong gave to an Australian CEO doing a project on leadership in 2011.  I've never seen any substantial interview with him before. Brett offers this commentary:

What a great ambassador Neil Armstrong was for America, and if there did happen to have been intelligent life on the moon there couldn’t have been a better ambassador for the human race.

Billy Collins, "Litany"

I love Billy Collins and this captures the post-Thanksgiving mood, somehow.


 

Blessed Thanksgiving!

Shamelessly pinched from here.

I went looking for a lovely Thanksgiving illustration for this post and found this instead. Not the mood I was going for, but too silly not to share. Happy Thanksgiving, internet friends!

Here's Msgr. Charles Pope with lovely thoughts to help inspire gratitude.

And of course a little Lincoln for the occasion.

By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.
The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.
In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

P.S. I solemnly swear NOT to sully a social occasion by serving as an instrument of propaganda.  

If You Like Your Free Market, You Can Keep It

Andrew McCarthy lays out the "failure" of Obamacare. Read the whole thing for the step-by-step (the current failure is planned -- maybe not the website, but the booting of everyone who self-insures out of their programs-- but here's the conclusion.

The manufactured financial crisis will be portrayed as a demonstration that exchanges based on the assumption that individuals will take responsibility for their own “private” insurance arrangements do not work. It will be time to solve the crisis by a seamless transition — there’s that word again — to a fully socialized health-care system, now overtly controlled by the government. “Free” health care for everyone — with all the substandard treatment, absurd wait times, and rationing that entails — will be supported by a few “tweaks” to our progressive tax system . . . no more unwieldy, unpredictable premium payments.

Watch that Jon Stewart interview with Sebelius again (I wrote about it here) and see before your eyes that is exactly what is being set up. 

Annals of Self-Awareness, 6

This piece would be annoying enough if it weren't running the same week as the JFK retrospective. I will let John Zmirak comment, copying and pasting from his Facebook page.

The NY Times ran the column [linked above] by a liberal Pole contemptuous of those who think that the plane crash that decapitated the Polish government in 2010 on the way to visit Russia to commemorate the Katyn massacre. Because it is SO absurd to suspect anything like that of the Russian secret service, right? (I'm not saying it was a conspiracy, but it certainly had the smell of one.) The column presents the mourning over these conservative politicians' deaths as a sick fetish cult, and the suspicion as proof of paranoia--TWO WHOLE YEARS after the investigation was completed.

So what do we think of the NY Times' fetish cult of JFK? Of liberals' STILL trying to blame Dallas conservatives for a shot fired by a Communist into an anti-Communist president? Of the endless conspiracy theories, peddled by crackpots like Oliver Stone? FIFTY YEARS LATER.

That's okay, though. Americans need time to heal.

How Cookie Has Fallen

A friend posted this Sesame Street parody of the new Hunger Games flick. Qua parody it's cute, but I can't help lament how far poor Cookie Monster has fallen. He's reduced to cross-dressing! And I note that, true to the politically correct promise made on his behalf some years ago, he has to "exercise self-control" and NOT eat a cookie, substituting an alarm clock. Message to small children: it is safer to ingest metal and plastic than a cookie. Yeah, that's better.

I remember the old days when Cookie Monster was allowed to eat cookies -- and was sophisticated enough  for existentialism jokes.


And just for grins, here is a Cookie Monster favorite.

Give The President What He Needs

...to destroy himself and his Obamacare.

OMG, Republicans. When your political enemy is flailing, don't rescue him. Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster. WaPo knows it, and Bill Clinton and others are stating it all but openly. There is every reason to believe that come January, millions more people will be uninsured than before the law took place and people hate it and recognize that the President knew this would happen --people losing their insurance plans is a necessary step in getting them into Obamacare-- and straight-up lied about it for years.

Sen. Landrieu has proposed a "fix" that will kill the program, as that link above explains. (Or here's an explanation from the Conservative perspective -- either way.)

For the love of all that is holy, GOP-ers, do NOT oppose the Landrieu bill and propose your own alternative as this article says you are doing. If you do, the President will go the American people and claim, "We're trying to fix it, and Republicans don't want to help you at all."

Shut up, behave in gentleman-like manner, and tell the President, "Whatever you want to do to make good on your promise people can keep their plans, we will give you, as long as it doesn't raise taxes and government doesn't subsidize insurance companies, we are with you."

The Dems passed Obamacare without a single GOP vote, let them own it fully.  For once in your paltry, self-centered little lives, focus on people and families and not on your friends at the insurance companies  -- who were all eager to belly up to the Obamacare cronyism trough. Let everyone lie in the bed they made and just defend little people.

You are not going to do anything serious about Obamacare until you retake the Senate and/or the Presidency. Focus!

 Image shamelessly pinched from American Digest

Update: Different point, but I am too lazy to do a separate post, and it's still about Obamacare. In this case, how they're trying to sell it to young people (at least in Colorado) with a revolting series of ads. So revolting that even the local Planned Parenthood assumed they were parody. Simcha Fisher with good commentary on that.

most amazing of all?  These ads are not fake. Not satire.  Not a mean-spirited dig meant to rub dirt in the wounds of real people with real needs.
Planned Parenthood of Colorado, however, assumed they were. 
They indignantly sputtered on Twitter:

Unfortunate that anti-obamacare folks are #slutshaming #women who use #birthcontrol  #GotInsurance #ThanksObamacare http://twitpic.com/dkxrep

So there we are, folks.  Things have gotten so awful that even the awful people can't tell if the other awful people are being awful on purpose in a good, compassionate, progressive awful way, or in the old-fashioned, mocking, whatevershaming awful way, because THEY'RE JUST ALL SO AWFUL.  Oh, sorry, am I awfulpersonshaming?  Am I moronshaming? Hey, give me a break.  It's been a tough year, and I'll take what I can get.
Race to the bottom, folks.  If you're lucky, you'll only be paying 300% more for your insurance when you hit the floor.

Worst case scenario? Obamacare is repealed by 2014 so the Dems have a chance to win re-election. Best case scenario? It stays and destroys our healthcare system and closes all Catholic hospitals (because what no one has focused on is there's not just the HHS mandate, there's also the massive regulatory burden on not-for-profit hospitals that is going to kill them all anyway, even if we win the right not to pay for anyone's abortion or casual sex in court).  Then a series of free clinics run by nuns will spring up in response to exactly the same kinds of needs that sparked Christians to create the very first hospitals -- and there will be a vocations boom because people will see that they are needed and want to give themselves out of love. And in 50 years, a re-birth of freedom!