If you’ve read J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay, “On Fairy Stories,” you’re familiar with the fact that folk tales can trace their origins back through millennia and through countless cultures. Stories are adapted by each culture to meet its own peculiar needs, as outlined in this Telegraph.co.uk article.

However, you’ll also recall that Tolkien was very adamant in insisting that the fact that one story is descended from another does not mean they are the same stories.

Tip: Cronaca.

I have to admit I was surprised by the turnout for the 9/12 rallies. I’m not often surprised, expecting the worst as I do, most of the time.

I read a biography of Jefferson (way over my head; I didn’t understand half of it) back when I was in Elementary School. One thing I took away, though, was that Jefferson cherished a basic belief in the wisdom of the people. Let discussion be unfettered; let every party have its say, and the people (he believed) would choose the right argument most of the time.

Lincoln, coming along later, at a time when public debate was the most violent it’s ever been in this country, seemed a little less sanguine, but still generally confident in common sense of the people, when he said (reportedly), “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Me, I’ve grown cynical, living in a day when truth has ceased to be even a matter of interest for many of the most respected thinkers in the world. I remember C. S. Lewis’ line from That Hideous Strength—“They have an engine called the Press whereby the people are deceived.” I’ve never used the word “sheeple,” but I’d begun to fear that was what we’d become.

But I read about all those people in Washington D.C. on Saturday, and suddenly I have a little hope. There are (it appears) limits to the amount of nonsense the American people can be force-fed before they react.

Maybe that’s why Minnesota’s so liberal. Maybe we’re just too polite up here to tell our jailers, “You gave us gruel yesterday, and gruel today, and we’re sick of gruel! Especially when you’re billing us for it.”

Norman Borlaug is dead. He is of particular interest to me because he was a Norwegian-American boy, and he came to Luther College, Decorah, Iowa (which claimed him, as I recall, for some reason. Maybe because he came from nearby Cresco. Apparently he didn’t go to Luther) to speak during the year I attended the school. I think I heard him speak. I’m not exactly sure (and no, I wasn’t on drugs. I just have a bad memory). Through the use of high-yield crops, he saved the lives of billions of human beings. Yet he’s almost unknown.

I remember that for years after I’d seen him at Luther (I think I saw him) I heard critics complain that his “Green Revolution” was a fraud. “It’s unsustainable,” the critics said. “It depends too much on chemical fertilizers and technology.”

For leftists, saving billions of lives isn’t enough. You’ve got to do it the right way.

And, preferably, kill some capitalists in the process.

This is the Cité of Carcassonne in France, the largest medieval city with it’s walls intact.

I woke up this morning and the sun wouldn’t shine. I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine. I loaded sixteen tons of Number 9 coal, and the strawboss said, “This is a Bible school. We don’t even use coal. Have you ever considered more productive uses for your time?”

OK, OK. It wasn’t sixteen tons. But I did work today (my annual orientation talk to the incoming students), while the rest of you were enjoying your bourgeois, degenerate cookouts and picnics. I don’t mind. I’m glad to do it.

Because it makes me better than you.

And when you get down to it, isn’t that what we’re all working for, really?

I did a little web searching about my new exercise regimen, “Walking with weights.” I found that fitness experts are almost unanimous in their opinion that it’s a very, very bad idea. High risk of injury. Likely to cause dangerous high blood pressure levels.

Just what I’d expect. I finally find a discipline that really makes me feel good, and it turns out to be a dangerous drug.

Too late now, though. I’m hooked.

World has an incredible cover story on how a study program at the University of Texas was skunked by liberal faculty who care more about their careers than teaching students. It’s an example of liberalism undermining the ideas that prop it up or enable it to live, the results being uneducated students and purposeless colleges.

Talking about the program his designed, professor Rob Koons writes:

Our program was rightly perceived as a threat to the monopoly of what I call the Uncurriculum, which prevails at UT and at most universities today. It is the absence of required courses and of any structure or order to liberal studies. The Uncurriculum dictates that students accumulate courses that meet a ‘distribution’ standard—a smattering of courses scattered among many categories. Even within majors, the trend has been to eliminate required sequences. . . .

The Uncurriculum free-for-all gives undergraduates only the illusion of choice. In reality, the Uncurriculum model is entwined with the interests of the professoriate. If there are no courses students are required to take, there are no courses that professors are required to teach.

Professors at research universities focus on the accumulation of prestige through publication, the indispensable means for acquiring tenure and increasing one’s salary (through the leverage of outside offers). By allowing students to pick what they want to study, the Uncurriculum model eliminates a potentially great distraction from the quest for publications: the burden of teaching a required curriculum, unrelated to one’s own narrow research agenda. . . .

Rather than admit this self-interest, liberal arts professors at UT use postmodern and multicultural ideas to defend the Uncurriculum. These fashionable ideas form an ‘ideology’ in Marx’s sense: a system of ideas designed to cloak, rationalize, and defend an unjust set of relationships, namely, the exploitation of undergraduates and their underwriters (parents, taxpayers, and donors). . . .

Due to the Uncurriculum, the humanities are committing slow suicide. There has been a steady decline in liberal arts majors in the last thirty years (from over one-half to fewer than one-quarter of the total). However, the decline is slow enough to make little difference to tenured professors. . . .

The experience of the Western Civilization and American Institutions program underscores a sad truth about higher education in America—it is mostly run by and for the faculty. What it likes and dislikes trumps what would be best for students. Our system will never fully achieve its promise as long as that remains true.”

The Eilean Donan Castle

Filmmakers said The Dark Knight changed how superhero movies would be made in the future, so why haven’t we seen or heard about those new, influenced movies yet? For instance, where’s a good, dark Shazam flick?

I’ll wait for you stop laughing. No, no–take your time.

A group working to make eggs un-palatable to everyone has a video showing baby roosters killed by being tossed into a grinder. Male chicks apparently have no market value.

No, I didn’t watch the video. Yes, I think I’d have a problem killing cute little chicks, though I could get over it. A friend told me about killing quail for the first time recently, and he was rather disturbed going into it. But sanity returned to him, and he learned that quail come apart like they are made to be eaten. Fancy that.

About the chickens, I know the animal group thinks killing or eating animals is essentially cruel, but I don’t think most people do. A video like this will probably disturb those who are so completely removed from the land or natural processes that they don’t think where their food comes from and that any blood, dirt, or sweat is unnice and unwanted. (Unnice should be in the dictionary. It’s a good, modern word.)

I would think farmers have killed roosters for years, and I see that claim made on this blog post talking about city people keeping chickens in their city yards. Roosters fight with each other and make a lot of noise. That’s very unnice, but you can’t talk them out of it, so you have to grind them up. Someone from the hatchery shown in the video, according to USA Today, says this type of “instantaneous euthanasia” is standard for the industry and acceptable as humane by vets. It’s the industrial angle that makes this yucky, I think. Who wants to think of any animal being tossed in a grinder? Anyone would rather the company wring the chicks neck with their hands.