The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

The good and just Burt Likko wrote a post today on the controversy surrounding Newt Gingrich’s Food-Stamp President hubbub from last Monday night. Coincidently, this was posted on the heels of a post of mine which, while not about the controversy per say, did use it as a pretty firmly planted jumping off point. The [...]

Credit where credit’s due: Newt Gingrich knows how to play a room. On the evening of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the state of South Carolina, Newt doubled down on his earlier comments that the NAACP and black voters should demand a Paycheck President and not a Food-Stamp President. When asked by Juan Williams [...]

This photo shows the starboard hull backbone, lined up on a zero mark (the blue tape), and blocked in place along a reference wire stretched along the floor. The lower bulkheads have been “welded” in place using a high-strength filleting compound of epoxy, glass micro-spheres, and colloidal silica (the white substance at the intersection of [...]

(Previously, Parts 1,  2,  3 , 4,  5, 6, and 7) In the late-Ninties, after reading Dava Sobel’s Longitude I became semi-obsessed with the idea of owning a mechanical chronometer; that is to say, a watch that did not use a quartz movement that kept time accurately enough to be used for navigation. (Also, the walk between my apartment and my studio [...]

Erik writes in one of his latest pieces at American Times: “…personally, but I see no reason why we need a more youthful modernized GOP when the Democratic Party is already leaps and bounds closer to that mark. “ What Erik seems to be saying is that the modern Democratic party is essentially a mainline [...]

When your biggest supporters in print are people who won’t vote for you, your campaign’s in trouble.  The Liberals killed Huntsman with kindness, or at least that sort of condescending attitude which says “Hey, you don’t sweat much for a fat girl.” Huntsman shouldn’t have run in the first place.  Coming off an ambassadorial appointment [...]

As told in my comment on the League’s What is Your Sputnik Moment thread, I don’t like to drive faster than the posted speed limit. I don’t like driving faster than the posted speed limit because we live on a residential street, posted limit 30 mph — where people regularly drive 40mph or faster. One [...]

Ta-Nehisi Coates believes persons of color ought to take ownership of the Civil War. This is a noble sentiment, a cause he might take on himself, had he more of the scholarly chops to do so and less propensity to biting the long-dead asses of William Faulkner and Woodrow Wilson. Charitably, let’s start with where [...]

I have been reading about scarfing plywood for as long as I’ve been building boats, but I’ve never done it. The idea of hand-cutting a square 12:1 edge along a sheet of plywood just seemed impossibly impossible. But today I had no choice. The lay-ups for the rudders for the Tiki 38 are too long [...]

One of the key questions of political philosophy is about when it  is ever appropriate for a state to use its coercive power. People have often had various answers to his question. The ancients (both the Greeks and the Chinese) thought that the aim of the state was to help its citizens to be virtuous [...]