Warm Respect for a Scottish Ruin

Alex and Seonaid Maclean-Bristol’s house on the Isle of Coll in Scotland was built in the ruins of a house abandoned 150 years earlier.

"ON the tiny wind-lashed Isle of Coll in northwest Scotland, a modern five-bedroom farmhouse has risen from the ruins of a local landmark known as the White House, built in the mid-1700s.

The roofless limestone ruin had lain empty for more than 150 years before its transformation by Alex and Seonaid Maclean-Bristol, who share it with their children, Archie, 7; Fergus, 5; and Xander, 2. “There’s no part of the house that I don’t find magical,” said Mrs. Maclean-Bristol, 39, gazing out the glass walls in the living room toward the Atlantic, lapping at the rocky coastline that cups Rough Bay, or Grishipol in Gaelic.

The home is on one of a group of islands known as the Inner Hebrides that has a population of about 200."

SLIDESHOW

Via Jason, Belle Grove

Grassley Threatens Nomination Holds Over ATF Investigation

Via Sipsey Street Irregulars

Grassley Threatens Nomination Holds Over ATF Investigation

Senate panel postpones vote on four DOJ nominees

Burlingame After Meeting With Obama: He Turned His Back On Me

Debra Burlingame, the sister of Charles "Chic" Burlingame (pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon) met with President Obama today, along with other families who were victims of 9/11. Burlingame said she confronted Obama about Attorney General Eric Holder prosecuting the men who interrogated KSM, which may have produced intelligence leading us to bin Laden.

Via Weasel Zippers

Another victim of feminism

Image via Michelle Malkin through Sipsey Street Irregulars

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"One can respect the woman for her honesty, but it's hard to have a whole lot of pity for those who simply refuse to prioritize pursuing marriage and children:

I never envisaged life without a family. I had three significant relationships in my 20s and 30s, each of which I assumed would lead to marriage and children. My first relationship, with a fellow university student, ended after five years. We were 25, and he wasn’t ready to settle down, so we parted.

At 27, I started seeing the man who was to become my second major boyfriend. We had been together for 18 months when I found out he had been seeing someone else, so I was left with no choice but to end it.

I became involved with a man I was sure would be The One when I was 30. Right partner, right life-stage; what could go wrong? Three years down the line, he announced that he had fallen in love with someone else, and that it was over between us. And so, at the age of 33, I suddenly became single. The years that followed were some of the most difficult of my life, as close friends married and started families....

My regrets will always linger. My life is a poorer place for not having children, and I am less of a woman for not being a mother.

Needless to say, there are far many parents blithely encouraging their daughters to pursue worthless college degrees and dead-end "careers", and far too few encouraging them to place a priority on meeting and marrying the right kind of man."

The inevitable return of racism

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"It is becoming increasingly obvious that there was a legitimate reason underlying the imperialist European's concept of the White Man's Burden. Those who harbor a distaste for observable reality can shriek "racism" all they like, but no amount of moral self-preening or politically correct histrionics is going to change the fact that certain groups have repeatedly and reliably demonstrated a complete inability to maintain the societal infrastructure that is required to sustain Western-style civilization. There is no need to delve into potential biological or cultural explanations to simply observe what is not only historically and empirically obvious, but increasingly undeniable.

According to a new report, 47 percent of Detroiters are ”functionally illiterate.” The alarming new statistics were released by the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund on Wednesday. WWJ Newsradio 950 spoke with the Fund’s Director, Karen Tyler-Ruiz, who explained exactly what this means.

“Not able to fill out basic forms, for getting a job — those types of basic everyday (things). Reading a prescription; what’s on the bottle, how many you should take… just your basic everyday tasks,” she said. “I don’t really know how they get by, but they do. Are they getting by well? Well, that’s another question,” Tyler-Ruiz said.

Now, perhaps those who believe in racial, cultural, national, and ethnic equality will find this piece of evidence unconvincing too. Perhaps 47 percent isn't high enough to concern them, or perhaps they'll put it down to some mysterious cultural change that happens to coincide with the transformation of the racial demographics of Detroit. Or perhaps they will suspect semantic games behind ill-defined terms such as "functionally illiterate". Such excuses may smack of willful obtuseness, but are not entirely unreasonable.

So, here's the question."

Reconstruction’s Enduring Bitterness of Heart

====================== Despite fictional statements about malice toward none and charity for all, the reality of Radical Reconstruction in the American South left an enduring bitterness toward anything Northern. There was to be no happy reunion of formerly fraternal States; the recently liberated black man had a new Republican master his vote was securely shackled to. Bernhard Thuersam, Director Cape Fear Historical Institute www.cfhi.net ======== Reconstruction’s Enduring Bitterness of Heart: “The issue of whether the Negro should be the ward of the South or the ward of the Nation, took on a more sinister expression when the Republican party asserted a proprietary interest in the freedman. It is a truism of Reconstruction history that the Radicals enfranchised the Negro in order to build a Republican party in the South. This leads to a study of politics as the most important of all the divisive forces separating the sections and preventing the realization of harmony. The divisions over the Negro and [Radical Republican] politics in the Reconstruction era went so far as to create a situation of almost permanent sentimental disaffection on the part of Southerners. “The whites cannot forget that dismal period,” wrote James Bryce in 1891, “and their recollection of it makes them vehemently resolute that power shall never again pass into hands which so misused it. It is not revenge, it is not hatred, it is the instinct of self-preservation which governs them.” The South had in fact suffered so much that from that day on a mark of a Southern man was his distrust of all who were not born below the Mason-Dixon Line. The South later professed forgiveness to the men who fought in the fair fight of war. But to those who came victorious and “heaped indignities upon a fallen foe” it exhibited a “bitterness of heart that lasts as long as life endures.” The South, as one of its spokesmen said, came to believe “that what was desired and intended by the party in power was not a restored Union of equal States, but a subjected South, a dominant North, and a radical faction ruling all. Distrust of the Northern people, such as the fortunes of war and all the bitterness of surrender had failed to arouse, began to stir in the South; and her people began to look upon their brethren of the North as possessed of a cruel hatred which rejoiced to believe evil, and by a malignancy which would not stop at wrong or oppression.” “Whether right or wrong,” said General [John B.] Gordon before a Congressional Committee in 1871, “it is the impression of the Southern mind – it is the conviction of my own mind, in which I am perfectly sincere and honest – that we have not been met in the proper spirit.” There is not a page written in the vast literature of war and Reconstruction which does not corroborate Gordon’s judgment. Joel Chandler Harris poured out the emotional content of the Southern heart when he wrote, “It was the policy of lawlessness under the forms of law, of disenfranchisement, robbery, oppression and fraud. It was a deliberate attempt to humiliate the people who had lost everything by the war, and it aroused passion on both sides that were unknown when war was in actual progress.” The yawning chasm thus remained unclosed. Southerners still looked upon their connection with the Union as something forced and inevitable rather than something desirable.” (The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900, Paul H. Buck, Little, Brown and Company, 1937, pp. 69-71)

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Reconstruction’s Enduring Bitterness of Heart

Doctors Probing for Guns in the Home Misses the Diagnosis

OLEG VOLK
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"I answer doctors who oppose gun violence and I generally have a standard response by now. Since we're talking about safety at the core of the discussion, it's fair to say that their editorials and pleadings to reduce gun violence wind up killing the patient, that is, the disarmed community.

"Pediatricians who ask kids to rat out their parents for guns in the home is the equivalent of operating on the in-office patient and not noticing that he has stopped breathing. The focus is so narrow on so-called 'gun violence' that it ignores who is doing the shooting, and in every case in the pediatrician's office, it isn't their patient's parents. Why the nosey probe and punishment where there is no chance of finding the disease? The problem lies in misinformation and the very idea that gun violence is a disease.

Before I became a liberty writer, I was a Los Angeles Paramedic. I saw criminal shootings and wondered why the Paramedics aren't seeing self-defense shootings in equal numbers. I found out, and it led me to elaborate on that question and how it impacts all of our other rights. Like all of gun control, doctors who oppose gun ownership will never touch violence and might as well treat a patient and not notice he has stopped breathing. They are missing a critical point, if it is safety we're talking about."

Danger: Automatic Tax Trigger Ahead

"A diabolical plot is being hatched between Senate Democrats, the White House and three Republican accomplices — Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Mike Crapo of Idaho, and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia. The concept is to enact an amendment to the debt limit extension specifying certain targets for deficit reduction and then mandating automatic spending cuts AND tax increases to take effect if the goals are not met.

This formula permits backdoor tax increases on which nobody votes and no fingerprints appear. The taxes just happen automatically. The immaculate conception tax increase."

1970 Plymouth Hemi Cuda - 426/425 HP, 4-Speed

"Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing."
--Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791
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