I can’t answer that question, but I can answer this one:
Why did the Irish cancel Christmas last year?
They couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin.
Hey. I can say that. I’m entitled.
The video is one more reminder that famines are not actually caused by lack of food as such. The potato crop failed all over Europe, the potato crop had failed in Ireland many times before, and Ireland was exporting food all during the famine (1845 – 1852). The video is wrong to blame “free market” policy for that.
The Corn Laws were not “free market”, and they were not repealed until 1846 when starvation was well under way, and since there were no time machines in those days the repeal of the Corn Laws could not create a new economic structure in Ireland to prevent the famine.
The conditions that created the famine were established over decades by foreigners who ruled Ireland for their own benefit. It wasn’t as though they deliberately starved the Irish and in fact they did try to help. But what they had spent decades building in Ireland is what made efforts to relieve the famine ineffective.
Ireland has not to this day recovered its pre-famine population.
They assiduously sowed the dragon seeds. They shoulda’ knowed what was coming.
Guess who is the head of the signal foundation katherine maher
Incipient signs of failure theater in the Senate again.
Saw this on Instapundit, and clicking through the link I found this line:
It’s not all up to the politicians. The Senate Parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, has the final say in whether the GOP proposals follow the rules on spending. That’s one of the main concerns of Republican committee chairmen as they make slow progress toward bringing a bill to the floor sometime before the Easter recess in two weeks.
Total garbage. The Parliamentarian serves at the pleasure of the Majority Leader and has no power to forbid the Senate anything. There is no such office mentioned in Article I: the office is a creation of the Senate, and the Senate has absolute authority over its own rules. And the Parliamentarian can be overruled by simple majority vote at any time.
The blogger, not to pick on him but you can click through and find out, just swallows and regurgitates the GOPe narrative without question. Doesn’t dig into what the Parliamentarian actually does or what the mechanism of overruling the Parliamentarian looks like. That’s not a major research project, that’s five minutes with a search engine.
But they’re setting the stage for a failure to come up with anything by blaming the Parliamentarian in advance. They have done this before, recently in 2021, this time to benefit the Dems failure to enact what its base wanted. And in that link you can see they give the game away in paragraph 9:
His second stint came about in 2001 following the Republican ouster of then-parliamentarian Robert Dove. Dove angered the GOP majority, including Majority Leader Trent Lott, for rulings that made it difficult to push President George W. Bush’s budget and tax agenda through an evenly split Senate, according to The Washington Post.
Oh, when the Parliamentarian rules against the majority too many times the Majority Leader just fires them and gets a new one that rules differently? Do tell.
So the lineups are coming out (blessed be the lineups!), but I’m not clear whether we have to submit them to President Boasberg for his approval before the first pitch is thrown lest the game results be withheld or mooted by an injunction on account of failure to follow his proper procedures. This uncertainty is crushing the heretofore traditional high spirits of the day.
Happy Opening Day to all!
Somewhere, I think Clarice Feldman at American Thinker, it was pointed out that we now seem to have nearly 700 unelected presidents (federal district judges) instead of just one elected president.
Part of the uncertainty (assumed, albeit unmentioned) is that my own game of focus is to be played in a foreign nation . . . so the question of sovereign right is afoot!
The potato famine in Ireland was the primary reason some of my ancestors came to the USA. So, there was some good to come of it. At least for our family.
The potato was a relatively new food in Europe. It’s native to South America, where it was cultivated as early as 5000 years ago.
“Throughout Europe, the most important new food in the 19th century was the potato, which had three major advantages over other foods for the consumer: its lower rate of spoilage, its bulk (which easily satisfied hunger) and its cheapness. The crop slowly spread across Europe, becoming a major staple by mid-century, especially in Ireland.” https://www.bing.com/search?q=History+of+potatoes+in+Europe+&form=ANNTH1&refig=F81B0043F9DA47FC82E3EDA92C396C91&pc=DCTS
Potatoes are still an important food, but modern agriculture has pushed them out of the limelight. When I was a boy in the 1930s, potatoes were a main staple of our meals. Fried, baked, mashed, and boiled – we ate them a lot. Add a bit of meat on the side and it was a decent meal. Now we eat a baked potato about once a week, maybe less. There are so many other choices, the mind boggles.
J.J.:
Potatoes are also surprisingly nutritious.
Potatoes were not their exclusive diet of course; the people who had to live on a diet of mostly potatoes also had access to milk and kale.
Hence the Colcannon Song:
Did you ever eat Colcannon, made from lovely pickled cream?
With the greens and scallions mingled like a picture in a dream.
Did you ever make a hole on top to hold the melting flake
Of the creamy, flavoured butter that your mother used to make?
Oh you did, so you did, so did he and so did I.
And the more I think about it, sure, the nearer I’m to cry.
Oh, weren’t them the happy days when troubles we had not,
And our mothers made Colcannon in the little skillet pot.
Potatoes are my favorite food! Baked, mashed, air fried, sliced, diced, au gratined. I eat them in some form almost every day. They’re filling, surprisingly nutritiuous, and delicious.
Breaking: The White House pulls @EliseStefanik UN ambassador nomination over concerns about the GOP’s tight House margin.
I am very, very happy to be eating potatoes again, without gaining weight. I cook them, refrigerate them overnight, and then re-heat. This way, they are resistant starch, good for my digestion while reducing my insulin resistance.
Many years ago, when I was slowly wandering around South America, I spent a few days in Paucartambo, a small town in the Peruvian Andes. The town is famous for its potato market. I remember looking at hundreds of different kinds of potatoes. More interesting than it sounds. Similar story with bananas in Honduras.
“Potatoes are still an important food, but modern agriculture has pushed them out of the limelight.”
Don’t tell the farmers around here. I’m surrounded by potato farms.
In fact Washington is second in the nation in the production of potatoes, just behind Idaho. More than half the potatoes grown in the US are from these two states.
According to Grok, Per capita consumption of all potatoes (fresh and processed) was ~115.6 pounds in recent years (USDA, via Quora, 2018), with two-thirds processed (chips, fries, etc.)—around 77 pounds.
I think we’re still eating potatoes, just not at the dinner table.
In fact, “Americans eat more potatoes per capita than any other vegetable. As of the latest data, potatoes consistently top the list due to their widespread use, especially as French fries.”
Trump declares an end to ‘the Marxist war on women’
When I was in Ireland I stayed briefly with an Irish family. I was amazed to hear them talk about potatoes and all the words they used to describe potatoes.
Soapy is the word I recall in particular.
Thanks for all the potato comments.
A fe years back, a potato farmer in Skagit County ate onky potatoes for a year. Had all his vitals chedked monthly as i rercall. One year of the diet did him no harm. A publicity stunt, but it showed that, yes, they are very nutritious.
I too was enthralled by the variety of potatoes found in Peru. Amazing variety.
Purple potatoes, the skin and the flesh are available. They may have more nutrients (?), phtoflavinoids, and I like them. My wife found the appearance of purple mashed potatoes off putting though (more for me, :o).
I’ve mostly Irish ancestors. Only one of those great-great-grandparents came as a result of the Famine. My other ancestors all came much later. And about half of them came from counties that had been badly hit.
This guy’s a bit of an idiot harping on the “free market” as one of the causes. It had more to do with the fact that it was virtually impossible for Catholics to own land — they were mostly poorly compensated tenant farmers who had no opportunity to participate in any “free market.” They had an acre of crappy land they were allowed to farm for a mostly subsistence life, but everything else, their Protestant British (and sometimes Irish) Lords and Masters owned. And exported to sell. And made all the money on. Life in Ireland PRIOR to the Famine was miserable for Irish Catholics, and made even more miserable during the Famine.
Had there really been any sort of “free market,” the Irish might’ve fared better.
The current insanity in Ireland makes me ashamed to be of Irish descent
@Lee Also:Had there really been any sort of “free market,” the Irish might’ve fared better.
Ireland to that point had been a racket run by foreigners for the benefit of foreigners for centuries.
But there’s a sort of one-drop rule when it comes to academics and free markets: if anything kinda sorta sounding like a free market is involved the free market takes all blame. Take for example the most government-involved-and-regulated sector of the US economy, other than education, and that would be health care. None of these government interventions or regulations are to blame in any way–only that anyone is ever occasionally allowed to make a profit is all to blame.
“Making a profit is evil!”
— The communist motto, based on “Only the survival of State matters.”
…
Reminds me of anti-Semitism, too.
How dare Jews make money by lending!
(– I know it’s more complicated, but tell me how, again. )
Bret Baier interviews the DOGE team with Elon Musk on Fox News – Video
Niketas Choniates and Lee are so right: the Famine was NOT caused by “the free market policies of the British” because the British policies were the opposite of a free market. It was a controlled economy that created disaster because the people were NOT free to do what they needed to do to survive.
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I can’t answer that question, but I can answer this one:
Why did the Irish cancel Christmas last year?
They couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin.
Hey. I can say that. I’m entitled.
The video is one more reminder that famines are not actually caused by lack of food as such. The potato crop failed all over Europe, the potato crop had failed in Ireland many times before, and Ireland was exporting food all during the famine (1845 – 1852). The video is wrong to blame “free market” policy for that.
The Corn Laws were not “free market”, and they were not repealed until 1846 when starvation was well under way, and since there were no time machines in those days the repeal of the Corn Laws could not create a new economic structure in Ireland to prevent the famine.
The conditions that created the famine were established over decades by foreigners who ruled Ireland for their own benefit. It wasn’t as though they deliberately starved the Irish and in fact they did try to help. But what they had spent decades building in Ireland is what made efforts to relieve the famine ineffective.
Ireland has not to this day recovered its pre-famine population.
More crazy
https://x.com/DefiantLs/status/1905012552540868667
Don Surber with a heckuva column…
“….Trump unleashes the crossfire hurricane”—
https://instapundit.com/710926/
They assiduously sowed the dragon seeds. They shoulda’ knowed what was coming.
Guess who is the head of the signal foundation katherine maher
Incipient signs of failure theater in the Senate again.
Saw this on Instapundit, and clicking through the link I found this line:
Total garbage. The Parliamentarian serves at the pleasure of the Majority Leader and has no power to forbid the Senate anything. There is no such office mentioned in Article I: the office is a creation of the Senate, and the Senate has absolute authority over its own rules. And the Parliamentarian can be overruled by simple majority vote at any time.
The blogger, not to pick on him but you can click through and find out, just swallows and regurgitates the GOPe narrative without question. Doesn’t dig into what the Parliamentarian actually does or what the mechanism of overruling the Parliamentarian looks like. That’s not a major research project, that’s five minutes with a search engine.
But they’re setting the stage for a failure to come up with anything by blaming the Parliamentarian in advance. They have done this before, recently in 2021, this time to benefit the Dems failure to enact what its base wanted. And in that link you can see they give the game away in paragraph 9:
Oh, when the Parliamentarian rules against the majority too many times the Majority Leader just fires them and gets a new one that rules differently? Do tell.
So the lineups are coming out (blessed be the lineups!), but I’m not clear whether we have to submit them to President Boasberg for his approval before the first pitch is thrown lest the game results be withheld or mooted by an injunction on account of failure to follow his proper procedures. This uncertainty is crushing the heretofore traditional high spirits of the day.
Happy Opening Day to all!
Somewhere, I think Clarice Feldman at American Thinker, it was pointed out that we now seem to have nearly 700 unelected presidents (federal district judges) instead of just one elected president.
Part of the uncertainty (assumed, albeit unmentioned) is that my own game of focus is to be played in a foreign nation . . . so the question of sovereign right is afoot!
The potato famine in Ireland was the primary reason some of my ancestors came to the USA. So, there was some good to come of it. At least for our family.
The potato was a relatively new food in Europe. It’s native to South America, where it was cultivated as early as 5000 years ago.
“Throughout Europe, the most important new food in the 19th century was the potato, which had three major advantages over other foods for the consumer: its lower rate of spoilage, its bulk (which easily satisfied hunger) and its cheapness. The crop slowly spread across Europe, becoming a major staple by mid-century, especially in Ireland.”
https://www.bing.com/search?q=History+of+potatoes+in+Europe+&form=ANNTH1&refig=F81B0043F9DA47FC82E3EDA92C396C91&pc=DCTS
Potatoes are still an important food, but modern agriculture has pushed them out of the limelight. When I was a boy in the 1930s, potatoes were a main staple of our meals. Fried, baked, mashed, and boiled – we ate them a lot. Add a bit of meat on the side and it was a decent meal. Now we eat a baked potato about once a week, maybe less. There are so many other choices, the mind boggles.
J.J.:
Potatoes are also surprisingly nutritious.
Potatoes were not their exclusive diet of course; the people who had to live on a diet of mostly potatoes also had access to milk and kale.
Hence the Colcannon Song:
Potatoes are my favorite food! Baked, mashed, air fried, sliced, diced, au gratined. I eat them in some form almost every day. They’re filling, surprisingly nutritiuous, and delicious.
https://x.com/StellaEscoTV/status/1905326079486960115
Too bad, but carry on.
I wondered about that Stefanik seat. Smart move.
I am very, very happy to be eating potatoes again, without gaining weight. I cook them, refrigerate them overnight, and then re-heat. This way, they are resistant starch, good for my digestion while reducing my insulin resistance.
Many years ago, when I was slowly wandering around South America, I spent a few days in Paucartambo, a small town in the Peruvian Andes. The town is famous for its potato market. I remember looking at hundreds of different kinds of potatoes. More interesting than it sounds. Similar story with bananas in Honduras.
I like potatoes, but I’m part Irish.
Couple of interesting stories about the Democrat rent-a-mobs.
https://capitalhillnews.com/tracking-data-uncovers-coordinated-activist-presence-at-denver-progressive-rally/
https://x.com/TonySeruga/status/1903677337406992400
“Potatoes are still an important food, but modern agriculture has pushed them out of the limelight.”
Don’t tell the farmers around here. I’m surrounded by potato farms.
In fact Washington is second in the nation in the production of potatoes, just behind Idaho. More than half the potatoes grown in the US are from these two states.
According to Grok, Per capita consumption of all potatoes (fresh and processed) was ~115.6 pounds in recent years (USDA, via Quora, 2018), with two-thirds processed (chips, fries, etc.)—around 77 pounds.
I think we’re still eating potatoes, just not at the dinner table.
In fact, “Americans eat more potatoes per capita than any other vegetable. As of the latest data, potatoes consistently top the list due to their widespread use, especially as French fries.”
Trump declares an end to ‘the Marxist war on women’
“Under the Trump administration, we’re ending the Marxist war on women…protecting women’s rights, defending women’s dignity and standing up for the American moms and daughters — so many are represented here.”
Great communication!
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/mar/26/trump-declares-end-marxist-war-women/
Similar story with bananas in Honduras.
==
Cinema trailer ad, ca. 1948. Guessing broadcast before or after Movietone News
==
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFDOI24RRAE
When I was in Ireland I stayed briefly with an Irish family. I was amazed to hear them talk about potatoes and all the words they used to describe potatoes.
Soapy is the word I recall in particular.
Thanks for all the potato comments.
A fe years back, a potato farmer in Skagit County ate onky potatoes for a year. Had all his vitals chedked monthly as i rercall. One year of the diet did him no harm. A publicity stunt, but it showed that, yes, they are very nutritious.
I too was enthralled by the variety of potatoes found in Peru. Amazing variety.
Purple potatoes, the skin and the flesh are available. They may have more nutrients (?), phtoflavinoids, and I like them. My wife found the appearance of purple mashed potatoes off putting though (more for me, :o).
I’ve mostly Irish ancestors. Only one of those great-great-grandparents came as a result of the Famine. My other ancestors all came much later. And about half of them came from counties that had been badly hit.
This guy’s a bit of an idiot harping on the “free market” as one of the causes. It had more to do with the fact that it was virtually impossible for Catholics to own land — they were mostly poorly compensated tenant farmers who had no opportunity to participate in any “free market.” They had an acre of crappy land they were allowed to farm for a mostly subsistence life, but everything else, their Protestant British (and sometimes Irish) Lords and Masters owned. And exported to sell. And made all the money on. Life in Ireland PRIOR to the Famine was miserable for Irish Catholics, and made even more miserable during the Famine.
Had there really been any sort of “free market,” the Irish might’ve fared better.
The current insanity in Ireland makes me ashamed to be of Irish descent
@Lee Also:Had there really been any sort of “free market,” the Irish might’ve fared better.
Ireland to that point had been a racket run by foreigners for the benefit of foreigners for centuries.
But there’s a sort of one-drop rule when it comes to academics and free markets: if anything kinda sorta sounding like a free market is involved the free market takes all blame. Take for example the most government-involved-and-regulated sector of the US economy, other than education, and that would be health care. None of these government interventions or regulations are to blame in any way–only that anyone is ever occasionally allowed to make a profit is all to blame.
“Making a profit is evil!”
— The communist motto, based on “Only the survival of State matters.”
…
Reminds me of anti-Semitism, too.
How dare Jews make money by lending!
(– I know it’s more complicated, but tell me how, again. )
Bret Baier interviews the DOGE team with Elon Musk on Fox News – Video
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2025/03/bret-baier-interviews-doge-team-with.html
Niketas Choniates and Lee are so right: the Famine was NOT caused by “the free market policies of the British” because the British policies were the opposite of a free market. It was a controlled economy that created disaster because the people were NOT free to do what they needed to do to survive.