We're Trying to Help This Nation?

If the memory of this writer is correct, the country of Afghanistan has always been a basket-case. It have been, and may be, a great place to live if one were an Afghan, but as a real nation deserving the respect of the world it's a loser. It has been less than a nation or country than a geographical area populated by clans of the Hatfield-McCoy type.

Your faithful correspondent seems to remember that before the Russians invaded Afghanistan the president was assassinated in the parliamentary chamber by the member of a rival clan. The result was the crumbling of the country to the point that the USSR saw what they thought was an area of easy pickings. No one can explain what good thing that the Russians saw there, but they invested money and blood to try to get it. And they found that they were not fighting one nation, but a group of tribes.
The result of the Russian adventure in Afghanistan was the Taliban, which was created and supported by the Pakistani intelligence service.

The Taliban proved themselves to be despots worse than the previous regime by instituting the strictest versions of Sharia law, And even then they could barely rule the country.

When the US became involved in Afghanistan it seemed to have made the mistake that Afghanistan was a reasonable and somewhat united country. Instead it found that Afghanistan is divided and that the Afghanis are terribly corrupt. Instead of standing for values or ideas, they can often be bought. And it seems that Afghanis do not see the world the same way that the West does.

Consider the following:

FOXNews.com - Afghan Men Struggle With Sexual Identity, Study Finds

How can one deal with people like this?

So Long, Rocket Man

Our dear leader has apparently decided that that studying the nonsense that is known as Man-Made Global Warming is worth more of an investment than is the pursuit of pure space science. The man is an idiot.

Pamela Geller puts it in words much better than this writer can:
» Obama’s War on Science: Trillions for a Hoax, but Not One Cent for NASA’s Moon Mission - Big Journalism

Yodeling and Drinking Beer

Sometimes a hat is known by name but defies description due to the fact that the said hat is off several slightly different shapes.
An example would be the Tyrolean, or Alpine, hat.
The hats on both the left and right are Tyrolean hats, but the reader can see that there are slightly differences, mostly having to do the shaping of the brim and the dimpling of the crown. A third form of the hat, not shown, has a crease along the top of the crown along with two dimples in the front area.
Tyrolean hats were traditionally worn in the Alpine areas of Germany, Austria, Italy and France. In fact, to this day the dress uniforms of the French and Italian Alpine troops of their respective army include Tyrolean hats complete with feathers instead of the usual chamois brush as shown on the hat to the right.
It is not unusual to see Tyrolean hats covered with decorative pins. Originally each pin represented an Alpine mountain that the wearer had climbed. Nowadays the pins often represent towns visited or events attended. And the traditional Tyrolean hat was worn with a chamois brush ornament. These run from the size of large artist's sable brushes to the size of large shaving brushes.
The Tyrolean hat is a head warming hat. The brim is so small that it is useless for shading one from the sun.
One occasionally sees a form of Tyrolean hat worn by East coast businessmen. These are usually dark green of a finer felt than the traditional hat, have the three or four cord type hat band and usually have a small red feather.
The Tyrolean hat is a good hat for head warming and for style. It is not as heavy or serious in appearance than are the fedora, the bowler or the homburg. It is a somewhat more light-hearted and sporty hat and should appeal to those beginning hat wearers weaning themselves off the baseball hat.

Men In Hats

Here we have two images of the bowler/derby hat.
For those of a younger age the bowler may be identified with Charlie Chaplin, or Laurel and Hardy. Graybeards, while including the comedians in the derby wearing fellowship, primarily associate the bowler with the toff, such as John Steed of the Avengers, or with thugs, such as the turn of the century criminal gang known as the Plug-Uglies.
One rarely sees derbies worn nowadays except in Great Britain among the moneyed or in Bolivia among everyone. The Bolivians picked up the bowler habit from British railway workers back in the 1920s and have never given it up.
The bowler was originally developed as a sort of helmet for horsemen and game-keepers, and is still worn among the horsey set. It is also the hat the leveled the field, hat-wise, among the classes in England. Just a few years after the bowler was invented for the wealthy it was being worn by the poor and working class in London, and the wealthy. Before the bowler the wealthy wore high hats and the poor and working men wore caps or slouch hats. But, of course, it's not always the hat that one wears that defines the man, but the way the man wears the hat.
Who should wear a derby? Why not go with tradition? The toff, the villain, the jester and the horse rider. And the Bolivian.

Ready for a Little Brother?

As we are all aware by now, there was, this past Tuesday, a terrible earthquake in Haiti that resulted in many deaths (no one knows as of this date the total toll despite what the news channels claim) and horrible devastation.
Only the most heartless would not feel pity for the Haitians. And the nations of the world, and the United States, have responded to help Haitians try to recover and rebuild.
But consider this: President Obama, before even consulting with the president or prime minister of Haiti, decided to invest 100 million dollars in aid to Haiti. No other nation has pledge any where near that amount to Haiti. Mr. Obama deigned to send the Marines and the Army to Haiti with no authority from either the Haitian government or, more importantly, the Constitution.
One wonders if Mr. Obama would have pledged such an amount of money to a country affected by an earthquake is that country had been the Philippines, Albania or Mexico. We here at the Manor think not.
Your faithful correspondent is of the belief that Mr. Obama's over-reaction (massive amounts of aid are really the purview, in theory, of the United Nations) is due to two factors. The first is that Haiti is a poor and broken society that appears to be irreparable. Haiti is in the Caribbean, which, for better or worse, is often considered the US' pond.
This writer speculates that Mr. Obama will not only attempt to give aid to Haiti, but also fix Haiti. He will try to make Haiti into an effective and honest nation. And by doing so he will tie the United States to Haiti for at leat twenty years. In other words, he will make Haiti into a pseudo-colony. And do not be surprised if, within the next couple of years, you read in the newspaper that the government of Haiti appeals to the government of the US to be made a de jure territory of the US.
Finally, if you, the reader, decided to send some money to an aid organization to be used in Haiti, this writer would ask you to bypass the Clinton/Bush fund promoted by the President and the Red Cross. This writer asks you to investigate donating to the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities or World Vision simply because from those charities you get more bang for the buck.

Somebody Wakes Up

The ignorance of the slow incrementalism of bad ideas into a society and the average citizen's unthinking acceptance of the reassurances by the intelligentsia are greater corrosive elements to the soundness of a civilization than are attacks, violent or ideological, from without. The thin edger of the wedge, once it gets purchase into a fissure, is almost impossible to prevent from doing its work.

In Great Britain, for many years, the liberals, multi-culturalists, socialists and Islamo-philes, have been reassuring the average British subject that he has nothing to fear from the growing number of immigrants from Islamic nations or the radicalization of British Muslims. The idea was that British culture and society were much stronger than Islamic culture and that the Orcs would assimilate and become good and loyal Geordies and Cockneys and Scouses.

Well, the elites were wrong, and the average Brit has finally twigged that his neighborhood Muslim society may not be raising racing pigeons or arranging jumble sales to help out the needy:

Britons are suspicious towards Muslims, study finds - Telegraph

-The European Model

A few years ago, during the Danish cartoonist Mohammed scrapple, it was not unusual to hear or read someone state that the Danes are a brave people, despite the fact that Denmark folded to the Germans during WW 2 like a piece of cheap rice paper.
Well, some things never change:
Panic room saved artist Kurt Westergaard from Islamist assassin - Times Online
Imagine abandoning a five year old kid to save your own scrawny ass. That's a picture of our European "allies".

Being a Man in a World of Drones

As regular readers of these missives are well aware, this writer has long been on a campaign to educate about, and promote, the wearing of proper hats (not baseball caps or cricket caps except on the sporting field) by men. Be it known here, that while your faithful correspondent is of the opinion that hats with brims are really the best head wear for men in public, he will make allowances for the beret (among the arty, French and in trades where a brim is obstructive to one's work), the eight panel (aka "newsboy" ) and the Yorkshire (aka "sports car") caps.

Let us face the facts: a baseball cap on a grown man looks just damn silly, whether it is worn forwards, backwards or sideways, unless one is playing baseball, painting the house , or working a an Army mechanic fixing a real Jeep.

A proper hat on a man means that the man is a serious man. He is a man to be taken seriously. But only a man who knows how to wear a hat properly can be considered a serious man.

Consider this:

Big Hollywood » Blog Archive » The Way You Wear Your Hat – Listen Up, Hollywood, It’s Important

Or this:

Men's Hats: Fedoras, Porkpies and the Derby | The Art of Manliness

If you are a male reader of this pamphlet (this writer considers blogs as the modern form of pamphlet and flyer), and you do not have a proper hat, it would behoove you to get one; whether it be a fedora, pork pie, Stetson or derby.

This is the time for men who are men, and not drones controlled by women or the media or popular culture, to assert their manliness by wearing a man's hat (in the past only children did not wear hats). Men who are men and not drones, if they drink alcohol, drink beer, whiskey, rum, brandy or gin. They do not drink any mixed drink more complicated than whiskey and water, or a a martini. And men who smoke, chew or dip tobacco are not ashamed to do so, as long as they are discreet about expectorating unless in the presence of women or the clergy.

Real men do not trash talk and pose. They let their actions speak for them. For the past forty years the art of trash talking has become the norm, while actions come second. Consider rap and hip-hop. What is rap but a bunch of bragging and trash talk? What is hip-hop but the same in a softer mode?

This writer blames the current popularity of trash talk to the boxer formerly known as Cassius Clay. Mr. Clay was a wonderful boxer, but he was, during his career, mentally an adolescent. He was stuck in a period of life where what was once known as "chop fights" (the exchanging of verbal insults) was the norm. For the average male chop fights stopped in the ninth grade until Mr. Clay made it acceptable through the adoring reportage of sports writers. But since sports is the toy department of life, it can only be expected that sports writers admire childish things.

Consider this article concerning about the decorum and manliness of boxers of old:

Old Boxing Matches by Thomas Sowell on National Review Online