A Bow to the Ladies

 

A review of Understanding Mary Lee Settle, by George Garrett, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 1988, 187 pages.

One useful way to distinguish between types of novelists is to characterize them as either intensive or extensive. An intensive novel, much the more com­mon variety in modern times, deals with a small segment of individual experi­ence and consciousness, wringing from it the maximum psychological mean­ing. Though it may encompass intensive experiences, an extensive novel, more common in earlier times, paints with a broad brush and achieves social and his­torical complexity.

When a writer does both of these things at a high level, and can even com­bine them successfully into a seamless whole, then one begins to think in terms of “great” and “enduring.” This characterization fits Faulkner, Conrad, Hardy, Dostoyevski, and Solzhenitsyn. And, according to the novelist and poet George Garrett, our relatively unknown contemporary American and Southern writer, Mary Lee Settle, will, in the long view, find a place in this company.

More @ The Abbeville Institute

Trump Tweets: Threatens to Take Away Federal Funds from UC Berkeley for Preventing Free Speech with Violence

Via Billy

President Donald Trump threatened to take away federal funds from the University of California Berkeley for not allowing free speech on the campus. His comments were released this morning in a tweet:

If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?

More @ The Gateway Pundit

Milo Tells Tucker Carlson: "The Left Does Not Want to Debate me" After Berkeley Riots

Via Billy

A Patriotic Spring? After Brexit and Trump, can Geert Wilders pull it off in the Netherlands? (YES!)

Via Billy

While most politicians across Europe – Nigel Farage excepted – responded to Donald Trump's presidential candidacy with sneers of condescension and greeted his victory with either grudging congratulations or cries of apocalyptic alarm, Geert Wilders was an outspoken Trump cheerleader all along. The day after the American election, the crusading Dutch politician characterized America's verdict as “a political revolution” and a “stunning and historic achievement” that “sent a powerful message to the world.” He added: “I never doubted Mr. Trump would win. We are witnessing the same uprising on both sides of the Atlantic. The Patriotic Spring is sweeping the Western world.”

More @ Front Page

Win the farm: NC architect's organic land giveaway

Via David

 

Aspiring farmers with writing chops might want to take notice of this contest.

Three hours east of Asheville is Bluebird Hill Farm, nearly 13 rolling acres of fragrant lavender and other plants detailed beautifully in this Our State piece.

Award-winning architect-turned-farmer Norma Burns is the owner and operator of the farm in Bennett. But after nearly 18 years of growing herbs, specialty vegetables, cut flowers, native plants and more, Burns is looking for a change of pace. She's moving to Raleigh for a more urban lifestyle, and that's where you come in.

Burns is holding an essay contest for full ownership of her picturesque USDA-certified organic property. She wants to leave her beloved farm in the care of a “committed couple of any description with the life experience and physical stamina that active farming requires,” she said in a release. She’s insisting on a "committed couple" because “experience has shown that Bluebird Hill Farm can’t be operated successfully by a single individual.”

More @ Citizen-Times

Major U.S. Mistakes in the Vietnam War (and others)

Via Mike

Demonstrating Lack of Resolve, Misguided Negotiation Expectations, and Limited Strategic Outlook

From early 1965 through early 1968, there were six major confrontations between Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the Pacific Area Commander (CINCPAC) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). These involved a number of Johnson-McNamara policies and strategies that CINCPAC Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp and the JCS believed severely hindered the defeat of Communist aggression in Southeast Asia. After the war and his retirement, Admiral Sharp even wrote a book titled Strategies for Defeat: Vietnam in Perspective, first published in 1978. It was Sharp who characterized Johnson’s Operation Rolling Thunder as “powder-puff air warfare.” A major issue with Sharp and the JCS was the Johnson-McNamara policy of highly restricted bombing of strategic targets in North Vietnam, leaving huge enemy sanctuaries around the most strategic North Vietnamese military and logistical targets critical to their invasion of South Vietnam. President Nixon eventually reversed this costly and absurd policy.

More @ Tribune Papers

The three numbers that will keep Democrats from blocking Neil Gorsuch

While President Trump announced his Supreme Court nominee from the west hall of the White House, somewhere in Washington Chuck Schumer was gearing up for the political dogfight of his life.

As the minority leader prepares that resistance, he needs to memorize three numbers: 78, 80, and 83

Those digits are the ages of Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the oldest liberal Supreme Court justices.

They might as well be the key code to stop nuclear proliferation in the U.S. Senate.

More @ Washington Examiner

Science says liberals, not conservatives, are psychotic

Via Billy

 

 

 The American Journal of Political Science published a correction this year saying that the 2012 paper has “an error” — and that liberal political beliefs, not conservative ones, are actually linked to psychoticism.

“The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed,” the journal said in the startling correction.
“The descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.”

More @ New York Post

Libyans understand Trump’s motive behind order for travel ban

Via Billy

With a population of 6 million and historically the most prosperous of the seven majority-Muslim nations on President Trump’s contentious executive order curbing travel and refugee flows, oil-rich Libya stands out as the smallest and the wealthiest country in the group.

But after three years of civil war that left an opening for penetration by Islamic State terrorists and with rival governments in its eastern and western sectors — neither with full control of state agencies or the country’s borders — some Libyan leaders say they can readily understand what drove the new U.S. president to hit the pause button.

“It’s hard to demand that the USA or any other country not take precautionary measures,” said Abd Elhadi Ma’touk, a spokesman for the government in the eastern sector based in the city of Tobruk, 90 miles from the Egyptian border.

“Especially with the current chaos and division in Libya, there is an argument to restrict the entrance of certain people to America,” Mr. Ma’touk added.

More @ The Washington Times

Mother of son murdered by illegal immigrant asks Pelosi which of her children is 'expendable'

Via Billy

A Texas woman whose son was murdered by an illegal alien put House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on the spot during a town hall Tuesday evening.

CNN host Jake Tapper called on Laura for an audience question about sanctuary cities. Laura shared how her son had been "tortured," "tied up like an animal," and set on fire by an illegal immigrant in 2010.

"I am not a one-story mother. This happens every day because there are no laws enforcing the border," Laura said. "How do you reconcile in your head about allowing people to disavow the law?"

"The second part of my question is this: if you need to go home tonight and line up your babies as you say, and your grandbabies, which one of them could you look in their eyes today, and tell them that they're expendable for another foreign person to have a nicer life? Which one would you look to say, you, my child, are expendable for someone else to come over here and not follow the law."

More @ Washington Examiner

Flashback=> Obama: “We Simply Cannot Allow for People to Pour in, Undocumented and Unchecked”

Via Billy

 

 

The Gateway Pundit

Oh, the hypocrisy…

In 2005 Barack Obama told reporters,

“We simply cannot allow for people to pour in, undocumented and unchecked.”

@PressSec Obama 2005: "We simply cannot allow for people to pour in, undocumented, unchecked". OUCH! pic.twitter.com/1ibXXaNeeU

— Leahann Johnston (@Leaha_Luv) February 1, 2017

But today the Democrats are losing their minds over President Trump’s suspension of refugees from seven terror states – the same states the Obama administration was targeting.
The hypocrisy of the left knows no bounds.

Trump And Mattis Quietly Ramp Up Ground War On ISIS

Via Billy

   

The U.S. backed anti-ISIS coalition delivered armored vehicles to U.S.-backed Syrian rebels Tuesday, in a quiet sign of military escalation by the Trump administration.

“There are signs of full support from the new American leadership — more than before — for our forces,” an SDF spokesman told Reuters Tuesday. The Pentagon reportedly believes the Kurdish SDF forces are the only ones truly capable of retaking ISIS’s capital city of Raqqa in Syria.

The Syrian rebels, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, are a coalition of rebel groups supported by the U.S. whose primary mission is defeating ISIS. The coalition is largely dominated by Kurdish militia groups, much to the objection of U.S. NATO ally Turkey. Turkey regards these militia groups as great of a threat to its existence as Islamic State, hindering the then-Obama administration’s plans to provide further military assistance to the group.

More @ The Daily Caller

Picking and choosing: Fired AG defended Obama’s unlawful immigration amnesty & Pelosi, Schumer and 71 Democrats Voted to Ban Visas from Muslim Terror States

Via Billy

 

Former acting Attorney General Sally Q. Yates was cheered Tuesday by Democrats thrilled with her refusal to enforce President Trump’s executive order on refugees, but she wasn’t always as picky when it came to White House directives.

Ms. Yates, whom Mr. Trump fired Monday night, engaged in no such rebellion against President Obama’s order on immigration amnesty in her role as the second-ranking official in the Justice Department, even after a federal court declared it unlawful.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Mr. Obama’s executive order on amnesty in November 2015, six months after the Senate voted to confirm Ms. Yates as deputy attorney general. The U.S. Supreme Court declined in October to hear the Justice Department’s appeal.

Ms. Yates‘ decision to go to the mat for the Obama directive comes in sharp contrast to her defiance of the Trump administration, fueling accusations that she capped her 10 days as acting attorney general by crossing the line into political grandstanding.

How can a prosecutor justify as a matter of law defending one presidential order and not the other?

More @ The Washington Times

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  Pelosi, Schumer and 71 Democrats Voted to Ban Visas from Muslim Terror States