Mimsy Were the Borogoves

“Fight!” (Photo by Evan Vucci)

• Mark Steyn: “The other night my youngest expressed a wish to see The Manchurian Candidate—the original, of course. And, as great as it is, its famous ending seemed an artifact of a lost and somewhat innocent age: a man is able to stroll into a political rally and access easily a high-up vantage point with a direct line of sight to the nominee. Couldn’t happen now… And yet it just did.”
• Austin Ruse: “Good Lord Almighty, that man is a legend. He gets shot, gets up almost immediately, with blood running down his face, throws his fist in the air and shouts ‘fight, fight, fight.’ Donald Trump is a legend.”

The second printing contains eighteen new recipes.

I’ve just made the second print of Tempt Them with Tastier Foods (PDF File, 13.7 MB) available. It includes eighteen more Eddie Doucette recipes I’ve discovered over the past year, including one extra matchbook recipe, German Potato Salad, My Way, which is well worth making—with or without Elvis singing in the background. And the 1966 Turkey ala King looks like a great way to get rid of leftover turkey from Thanksgiving.

If you already have the first printing, I’ve made a PDF of the new recipes (PDF File, 141.6 KB) that you can slip into your book. I’ve also made it available as a smaller pamphlet (PDF File, 203.7 KB). If you choose to use the pamphlet, you will need to print landscape, with short-edge binding, and then fold it over.

• Full Book as PDF (PDF File, 13.7 MB)
• Full Book as ePub (ePub ebook file, 9.7 MB)
• Purchase a print copy
• All the new recipes (PDF File, 141.6 KB)
• Pamphlet of the new recipes (PDF File, 203.7 KB)

A few of these new recipes are from old newspapers that have recently come online. The three from the The Carlisle Mercury of Carlisle, Kentucky, in 1965 and 1966, were from the Nicholas County School web site.

More and more, the horse seems to be controlling the rider.

More and more, I do not trust calls for term limits on elected representatives, or for dispersing the permanent bureaucracy. It seems to me that both of these potentially useful proposals are being co-opted by the permanent state to weaken the ability of voters to change the system through elections. They’re deliberately designed to weaken elected officials while strengthening the permanent state.

Superficially, a lot of the calls for term limits seem, in my opinion, to miss the point entirely. First, and biggest, a long period in government results in the officeholder identifying more with government than with voters. Second, and related, is that a long period in government means that the officeholder has no experience in common with voters; even officeholders who started with experience outside government see that experience become more and more antiquated.

Most term limit-style proposals don’t just not fix those problems, they exacerbate them. They encourage, not gaining experience in the private sector, but moving from one office to another and thus identifying even more with government.

This tendency is so bad that it often becomes its own version of the Peter Principle, that people rise to the level of their own incompetence. A governor is doing a great job as governor? Get them out of the governor’s office and into the race for the White House! This has become so ingrained in the political class that just about every successful governor is already planning on a Presidential run in their second term.

Even outside of governorships—which is where term limits for elected officials makes the most sense—it often seems that the moment a successful representative gains a name, they are instantly neutered by moves into the federal bureaucracy or even more powerless offices like the vice presidency. This appears to be what happened with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and what the bureaucracy tried to do when they attempted to bribe Arizona’s Kari Lake to move into DC’s bureaucratic event horizon.

This is one of the two books I used most to find Centennial recipes.

Last year, I provided recipes from cookbooks that celebrated the bicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This year, I’m going back to 1876 for some great—and some merely good—recipes to help celebrate Independence Day. As we near the Sestercentennial in 2026, it’s interesting to look back on our shared culinary history during previous celebrations.

One of the benefits of 150-year-old cookbooks is that this year, all of the books I’m referencing except one are available for download. The only one that isn’t available, I’ve scanned in myself. So you can download the Rumford Company’s ca. 1877 Horsford Cook-Book (PDF File, 4.7 MB) now, too.

These are books that either directly celebrated the Centennial or advertised awards for taking part in other celebrations. There don’t seem to be that many. Some may have been lost, of course, but I wonder how popular Centennial celebrations were in 1876. It was barely a decade after the Civil War ended (1865) and only six years after the last Confederate state was readmitted to the Union. Ulysses S. Grant—General Grant in the war—had just finished his second term.

Clearly, not everyone was into the spirit of ’76. The Ladies of Plymouth Church in Des Moines, Iowa came out with a cookbook that they titled, literally, “76.” (with quotes). Despite its title it does not mention the Centennial at all. At the end of its introduction it quotes Jefferson:

“May you live long and prosper.”

But that turns out to be, not the founder, but an actor famous for playing Rip van Winkle. Whether Leonard Nimoy got his variation of this randomly, via Joseph Jefferson, or via Harry S. Truman, who apparently also appropriated it, is not recorded in the historical record.

I never planned to do an ice cream series. The inaugural post held eight ice cream recipes, which seemed more than enough at the time. But then, by 2023, I’d found six more great ice creams to add to the list. Having already presented fourteen great summer ice cream options, do I really need more ice cream?

I think Dr. Peter Venkman said it best: when someone asks if you need more ice cream, you say yes!

I’ve already presented two ice creams this year. I love the flavor of maple syrup. I included a great maple ice cream from 1942 in the inaugural post in this series as well as one from 1928 in my post on the Frigidaire Recipes cookbook. This year’s Pi Day’s boiled cider pie also included a peanut butter and maple ice cream from Vermont.

In the same vein as the Russian ice cream from last year’s post, but even simpler, that Vermont maple peanut ice cream not only requires no cooking, it doesn’t even fold the cream into syrup. Just whip it all together. Even driving to the store takes more work.

For a neat twist, add a tablespoon or two of your favorite jam or jelly to it for a peanut butter and jelly ice cream! And for an even more Vermonty twist than maple syrup, switch out the maple syrup for boiled cider. I first ran across boiled cider in Vrest Orton’s The American Cider Book and can’t stop raving about it. Boiling it is a great way of using up a big jug of apple cider from autumn sales. Bring to a boil, and then simmer very slowly, at least five cups of cider. Keep simmering until it’s down to maple syrup consistency, which will be about one-fifth its volume or weight.

There are a lot smarter people than me commenting on the necessary response to the witch hunt in New York City, so I’m going to lead with them.

• Ace: “Enough of the compromised fake Republicans at National Review and Commentary. Man up or get out.”
• Bookworm: “It’s to be hoped that, by turning Trump into an outlaw, the Democrats both bit off more than they can chew and woke the sleeping giant. Plus, they inspired memes…”
• Daniel Greer: “Citizens have seen politically motivated judges & prosecutors warp statutes, lawmakers remove protections to target disfavored individuals retroactively, and executives selectively ignore the plain text of the law they’re sworn to uphold. How will Texas’ public servants respond?”
• Sarah Hoyt: “…if the verdict weren’t a foregone conclusion, they’d have tried to make the trial more plausible.”
• William A. Jacobson: “Lawfare very easily can become warfare when people lose trust in the institutions that are supposed to protect against political persecution.”
• Robert Stacy McCain: “…the problem with writing about this trial is that the English language doesn’t have enough synonyms for bullshit.”
• Brooke L. Rollins: “This accommodation must stop. We will not last if we continue giving them the civics of comity while they give us the hard hand of lawfare. Let them live under the rules they impose upon us—upon ordinary Americans.”
• Mark Steyn: “A governing party of a serious nation so indifferent to elementary maxims of prudence that it's prepared to invent out of whole cloth crimes with which to convict the leader of the opposition is not one you'd want to bank on to keep us from stumbling into, say, a third world war… right now there is no law in America, and, in consequence, no politics. So there is no point in pretending you enjoy benefit of either, and in doing so you're just part of the problem.”

There’s a lot of truth to this meme: Democrats are certainly acting as if Biden didn’t actually win.

This two-tier policing, where one side commits actual crimes and goes free, and one side is criminalized for what aren’t even crimes, has to go. All extradition requests to states like New York and DC must be actively refused. Those states cannot be trusted to exonerate the innocent any more than they can be trusted to lock up the guilty. Their goal is demonstrably to free dangerous criminals—and to lock up innocent people for the crime of holding different political views.

And everything to the institutional left is political. They will not permit a course correction.

While the verdict in New York City was no surprise given the corrupt instructions from the judge, it was still disappointing that there were not enough old school independent New Yorkers to at least provide some dissent from the swamp.

But that’s how the American judicial system works nowadays. Any jurors willing to examine the evidence against the government’s position and the lack of evidence for it would have been weeded out during jury selection.

Mark Steyn pointed out the further aid to corruption, that prosecutors are allowed to throw multiple dubious allegations against the defendant like strands of spaghetti against a wall, in the hope that one of them will stick—both in the jury’s mind and in the public’s. If this is allowed to stand it will grow far worse in New York and other Democrat-run states. Jurors there won’t even be required to agree on which strand of spaghetti they’re convicting on. Even now we don’t know what the actual crime is that Trump has been convicted of. New York and DC and every place that Democrats take over have become insanely Kafkaesque.

One of the weird results of the February shooting at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church is seeing how bipartisan the hatred for Osteen, and the so-called prosperity gospel¹, is. The reaction in comments and even in some public postings come very close to advocating violence against him. They start with a superficial acknowledgment that it’s too bad the violence occurred against a child, and then use the violence as a platform to complain about the existence of Osteen, Lakewood Church, and the message of those kinds of megachurches.

These responses highlight that there are still popular people who are nonetheless open season, literally, for attacks from both sides of the political spectrum. The left hates Osteen because he’s Christian, and the right hates him because he’s not.

So there are obviously a lot of people who do not like prosperity gospel preachers and prosperity gospel. But by the same token, a lot of people are clearly fans of either the preachers or the message. I know very little about prosperity gospel. I did, with a friend, see Joel Osteen once, and there’s definitely a sense of asking God for material things that seems way over the top for me as a Catholic.

Catholics have moved away from asking God for earthly things. In the period between when I went to Mass regularly as a child and when I returned to the church several years ago, the Ecce Agnus Dei² response changed from “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” to “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.”

Now, that’s probably not a change in meaning. Judging from the original Latin, it was probably always supposed to be a plea for spiritual healing, and my understanding is that this was a change in the American missal, not the worldwide missal. It was a change to better translate the Latin missal of Rome.

Domine, non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum, sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea.

“Last night, I woke up frightened o’ dying… I felt as if everythin’ was lost.”

Why should we care what a comic book writer with aspirations to wizardry has to say about superpowered manipulative bastards? The short answer is, we shouldn’t. But Moore is a very smart and insightful writer. All of the things he has his V and V-adjacent characters do are things that twentieth and twenty-first politicians would like to do. Does it make it okay that unlike everyone else’s eugenics programs throughout the last century and a half, Miracle Man’s is likely to be successful at its goal of improving the human race? Does it matter if Veidt’s murder of millions actually does usher in world peace?

All powerful modern politicians and many powerful modern billionaires claim that turning over individual freedom to the state or to their product will improve lives. Are they right? Does it even matter if they’re right?

Even if modern technology literally saves us, as it does Cyborg in Twilight, is it right to give so much of our lives over to it?

In Moore’s worlds, your revolutions are only as perfect as your successors. Moore’s Miracleman ends with the complete dehumanization of humanity. Consistent with Moore’s elevation of Hitler as the epitome of the twentieth century, it is one of Gargunza’s South American Nazis who first informs Miracleman that he is humanity’s replacement. The Nazi accepts his own death at Miracleman’s hands, because Miracleman’s impending takeover of the world is what he and the other Nazis have worked their lives for.¹

The Qys, the co-rulers of the universe, agree with Gargunza’s Nazis. It is only the perfected miracle-beings who are “not of animal status” in the “intelligent space” of the universe.

Miraclewoman, Avril, fully accepts the Qys’s explanation. Where Michael Moran still retains respect for humanity as humanity, Avril sees humans as herd animals to be shepherded at best and culled to perfection at worst.²