Not too many readers will remember the words in the title above. It is from 1970, and the  words are attributed to Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. He acted as a distractive force for President Nixon, and was dispatched regularly to grab some headlines. The nabobs in question here were the sad lot of pundits known as “journalists”, said to be one of the easiest college degrees to attain.

Natter: To talk continuously for a long time without any particular purpose.

Nabob: An Indian ruler within the Mogul empire; someone of great wealth or importance; a person with a grandiose style or manner.

Agnew certainly did his homework on this one, drawing out two obscure words and making them memorable, so much so that I still remember the quote 54 years later.

Below the fold are some more quotes from the 31 pages I have preserved:

Continue reading “Nattering nabobs of negativity” →

Christmas is mostly for kids, and I think it is perfectly OK to let their imaginations be filled with Santa and reindeer and chimneys. When my kids were little we had a tradition that lasted for a brief while until some cynical brat ruined it.

We lived in Billings, Montana. It’s a nice town, mostly, and is under what are called the Rims, a long geological formation, part of it seen above, that runs the length of the town. I am told that they formed as waves from an inland sea washed in and out, not unlike Galveston, Texas.

Continue reading “A magical Christmas” →

Over the years I have been collecting bits and piece of witty snarks and insightful comments in a file I called “Wit and Wisdom”. I pulled it up last week and found that I had a little over one page of items, meaning I had lost the original. But wait! There were two files by that name, one with a different suffix, and it turned out to be 31 pages. I remember sitting at our dining room table in Bozeman when I first decided I needed a way to save stuff, and putting these gems onto my laptop. That it survived all these years, perhaps twenty or more, is no tribute to my competency, but rather to good luck, nothing more.

I’ve gone over those 31 pages now, and found quite a few items that I am going to repeat here, a few at a time. There’s a lot in there that I would not now take trouble to record, notably Edward Abbey, whose every written word (except some of his fiction, which I found over-the-top) I have read. I also made it a point to read everything written by George Orwell, but he does not turn up very often in this file. I suspect that is because somewhere I have a separate file for him.

Continue reading “Orgies are vile …” →

I came upon the following lines from an obscure source, quoting Horace, among the many legends of ancient literature whom I have not read.

“Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.”

The line  translates to “Mountains will be in labor, and a ridiculous mouse will be born.” This phrase comes from Horace’s Satires (Book 1, Satire 8) and is often interpreted as a commentary on the disparity between expectations and outcomes. I am plagiarizing that last line starting with “This phrase…”.

Continue reading “The Christmas letter …” →

One of the many atrocities that played out against us during Covid was the trashing of the Bill of Rights. Specifically, the following amendments were jettisoned:

First Amendment: Prohibition of the free exercise of religion. Churches were shut down.
First Amendment: Abridgement of freedom of speech. Facebook, YouTube, and even tiny Websites like NextDoor all forbade any criticism of the CDC or questioning of the existence of the virus.
First Amendment: Abridgement of freedom of the press, but don’t go there. It’s been a dead letter for ages.
First Amendment: The right of the people peaceably to assemble. Sports stadiums were shut down, along with indoor gathering spaces like concert halls and museums. Large gatherings were forbidden, along with even small family gatherings.
Ninth Amendment: Freedom to travel.

Continue reading “Life before and after the 14th Amendment” →

I started out reading a book called We Have Never Been Woke, by Musa Al-Gharbia, and finally, on page 50, I thought “I can’t do this.” I cannot finish the book. It is well-written by a new PhD who is also an intellectual, and I am reminded that I am neither of those things, and that I’ve never been curious about people who claim to be “woke.” I think it is all self-aggrandized posturing, large-scale virtue signaling. It’s made its way on to campuses, but then most campuses have long ceased to serve intelligent function, that is, producing critical thinkers who are hard-working  and serious adult humans. Instead (most) colleges offer a new kind of dumbed down.

Worse yet, Climate Alarmists have saturated campuses and schools, so that our graduating classes at all levels don’t know shit about climate and don’t know they don’t know shit. It is large-scale Dunning-Kruger. We’re in a new dark age. It’s quite a predicament.

Continue reading “On being woke, the Great Awokening” →