We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
1Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.
2And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred.
3And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.
4But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
5Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple,
6And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.
7Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.
8Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them;
9And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.
10Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.
11Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him.
We dedicate this piece to all of those who are still seething about McCain. This will soothe the injured heart: Anderson and Roe piano duo with Saint-Saens' The Swan. (h/t, Classical Virtuoso)
There seem to be Bellow fans and Nabokov fans. I'd have to place myself among the Nabokov, but only because I've read more of his. Lolita's fame - more the fame of shock value than the literary - is probably undeserved. Are older guys attracted to younger women sometimes? Indeed. Historically, it was not uncommon for girls/women to be married at Lolita's age. From the NYT:
Legal considerations aside, not everyone took to the book. Edmund Wilson was repulsed; like many, he had trouble untangling author and narrator. Evelyn Waugh thought the novel without merit, except as smut. (On which count it was "highly exciting." To E. M. Forster those same pages were "rather a bore.") Rebecca West found the novel labored and ugly, a diluted blend of Peter de Vries and S. J. Perelman. Worse, she found in "Lolita" a great deal of Dostoyevsky, whom Nabokov abhorred.
Hmmm. I'd tend to take the Rebecca West comment as a compliment. Anyway, read entire Lolita update in the NYT.
"At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extraordinary."
Martin Heidegger
Poet and critic Adam Kirsch discusses the metaphysics of modern poetry in an essay titled The Taste of Silence. A quote:
...Heidegger, more than any other philosopher, looked to poetry as a model of what thinking should be. He used individual poems, especially the hymns of Hölderlin, to help explicate his own ideas about nature, technology, art, and history. He constantly dwelled on the mysteries of language and translation, how the way we name things can reveal and conceal their essence. And he himself approached writing in a poetic spirit. We usually think of philosophy, especially German philosophy, as being written in dry, awkward jargon. But Heidegger's writing, though difficult, is deeply creative: he uses nouns as verbs and verbs as nouns, puns on etymologies, and even plays with spelling, all in an effort to jar the reader out of conventional ways of reading and thinking.
All this makes it natural that writers and theorists of language look to Heidegger. But in "The Origin of the Work of Art," he issues a particular invitation to poets, arguing that poetry is in some way the model for all other art forms, and the exemplary activity of human beings. The poet, he writes, "uses the word—not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word." Like Emerson, that is, Heidegger regards poetry as the truest form of language, and most language as merely defective poetry. "The nature of poetry," he goes so far as to declare, "is the founding of truth."
This week I have been mostly engaged in helping my old mate Colin build a shed. I'm enjoying it immensely; it's honest, manly toil with cement mixer and saw in pursuit of erecting an honest, manly structure wherein honest and manly things may be done.
The tale brought to mind the interview with Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson:
Obama's church. I once quit a UCC church something like that one.
Did you make some money?Go away. But what if I made it on Powerball?
Speaking of which, why is CEO pay sometimes astronomical? Megan McArdle. Personally, I do not care what they make, although there is a touch of envy for Michael Eisner's income...and also for Roger Clemens' and Bill Clinton's and for that matter, Barack Obama's.
We recently mentioned that the Three Basic Food-groups consist of Chips, Dip, and Beer. Mr. Free Market reminds us of the competing paradigm: Alcohol, Nicotine, and Coffee.
"Pick your poison," says I. And If I followed the Federal government's Food Pyramid (image), I would weigh 300 lbs.
"6-11 servings of bread, cereal, wheat, rice or pasta"? Sheesh.
His new record, Dirt Farmer, is up for a Grammy. If you are in the neighborhood, his band (with Larry Campbell) will be performing in Woodstock, NY, tonight. This video from a recent performance on the Don Imus radio show.
Of course, roses and nice diamonds are never wrong, but if the evil greedy bank is in process of repossessing your trailer or your houseboat, you should consider a Gift Subscription to Maggie's Farm Online Edition!
The price is right, and we offer year-long mental, spiritual, and physical stimulation rather than the ephemeral pleasure of a rose. And we are sexy, too.
We Psychoanalysts know how much a person's memory is a story, and a story which evolves over time, both in detail and in theme. In psychoanalysis (and in analysis only - not in life!), we take the difficult and disciplined - but also luxurious - position of receiving memory (and everything else) as "text" or "narrative" in the pomo sense (although the technique far precedes pomo), and do not worry about its historical factuality because our job is to address psychological "facts" (see Spence and Wallerstein, or the wonderful Roy Schafer whose talk I attended in NYC last month).
In analysis, the potential power of that stance exceeds the power of truth-seeking in the everyday sense. We call it "psychic reality," and we confuse it with reality at our peril: in the human mind, belief, wish and fantasy often trump facts. Sanity lies in making those distinctions. My wise supervisor told me "When patients talk about the past, they are talking about the present. When they talk about the present, they are referring to the past. And they are always talking about the transference."
But that is analysis. In real life, as opposed to the somewhat strange "analytic situation," we analysts tend to be drawn to real hard human facts, like thirsty people on a desert.
That is why we often prefer Dickens and Melville to psychological studies or the New York Times.
Thoughts about John McCain. As somebody said on the radio, "I would crawl over broken glass to vote for McCain over Hillary Clinton." McCain is not a Conservative ideologue, but he is a Conservative. When it comes to immigration law, I see no Liberal-Conservative ideology issue at the heart of it; only a Dem-Repub issue. When it comes to McCain-Feingold, McCain was way wrong on the spirit and word of the Constitution. His CPAC speech yesterday is here. You might term it pandering, but McCain isn't much of a panderer.
"Europe is facing a demographic disaster," he said. "That's the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life, and eroded morality."
He called for the United States to become energy secure, because "America must never be held hostage by the likes of Putin, (Venezuelan President Hugo) Chavez and (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad,"
Romney said if the United States did not change course "we could become the France of the 21st century."
[T]he general welfare--the common good--requires that government be limited. Government's responsibility is primary when the questions involve defending the nation from attack and subversion, protecting people from physical assaults and various other forms of depredation, and maintain public order. In other ways, however, its role is subsidiary: to support the work of families, religious communities, and other civil institutions of civil society that shoulder the primary burden of forming upright and decent citizens, caring for those in need, encouraging people to meet their responsibilities to one another while also discouraging them from harming themselves or others
Governmental respect for individual freedom and the autonomy of nongovernmental spheres of authority is, then, a requirement of political morality. Government must not try to run people's lives or usurp the roles and responsibilities of families, religious beliefs, and other character-and-culture-forming authoritative communities. The usurpation of the just authority of families, religious communities, and other institutions is unjust in principle, often seriously so, and the record of big government in the twentieth century--even when it has not degenerated into vicious totalitarianism--shows that it does little good in the long run and frequently harms those it seeks to help.
Retiring from the fieldwith dignity. What Mitt could have done differently: Halprin. A good man. By the way, McCain's CPAC speech today was good, whether you believe him or not, he said all the right things.
Moslem tennis starin trouble. They don't like her legs, but they look fine to me.
Archbishop Moonbat: "..Dr Williams says the argument that "there's one law for everybody… I think that's a bit of a danger". Blue Crab. Where do churches find such spineless wimps who will only stand up for suicide? The Archbishop should refresh his memory on Sharia.
Exxon's taxes.Exxon paid more taxes than the bottom 50% of American taxpayers. Of course, that tax $ they paid came out of my 401K, didn't it? So, really, I paid Exxon's taxes because it's a public company.
"What is it about business success that turns so many retired executives into socialists?" View from 1776
The silly issue of whether the Indians had butter for their baked winter squash (and their corn on the cob) brought to mind one of the best scenes ever seen on the silver screen, from Mr. William Claude Fields, in the Yukon film parody The Fatal Glass of Beer:
In Europe a secularized post-Christian culture is facing a Muslim one. The secularized culture is hedonist and values only its present life, because it does not believe in an afterlife. This is why it will surrender when threatened with death because life is the only thing it has to lose. This is why it will accept submission without fighting for its freedom. Nobody fights for the flag of hedonism, not even the hedonists themselves.
Also:
Appeasement, accommodation and outright defeatism overwhelmingly characterize the conduct of western countries in the face of Islamic resurgence. Many of them are so hapless that they are even turning against those who would protect them; several EU states have initiated legal proceedings against American agencies for capturing and removing terrorists from their midst. Last year, for example, a German court issued an arrest warrant for thirteen CIA agents involved in the capture and interrogation of a terrorist suspect that took place in Macedonia. The man, one Khaled al-Masri, is a German national of Lebanese descent. In an almost surreal twist, al-Masri's lawyers in a press conference referred to the agents as ‘suspects.'
"I'm walking through streets that are dead Walking, walking with you in my head My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired And the clouds are weeping
Did I hear someone tell a lie? Did I hear someone's distant cry? I spoke like a child; you destroyed me with a smile While I was sleeping
I'm sick of love but I'm in the thick of it This kind of love, I'm so sick of it
I see, I see lovers in the meadow I see, I see silhouettes in the window I watch them 'til they're gone and they leave me hanging on To a shadow
I'm sick of love; I hear the clock tick This kind of love; I'm love sick
Sometimes the silence can be like the thunder Sometimes I wanna take to the road and plunder Could you ever be true? I think of you And I wonder
I'm sick of love; I wish I'd never met you I'm sick of love; I'm trying to forget you
Just don't know what to do I'd give anything to Be with you."
Love Sick, from 1997's "Time Out of Mind." The album cuts are very listenable and have held up well, but as usual Bob improved on them in his live performances, such as the one below, from the 1998 Grammy Awards (this is the famous "Soy Bomb" appearance, but the high sound quality edit released by Columbia Records cuts him out. I have included the second video so viewers can see what the audience actually saw during the middle portion of the performance).
Even if you aren't scouting deer for hunting, heat- and motion- detecting cameras can tell you a lot about what lives out there. This photo came from some deer hunter's motion sensor camera in Montana.
How to prepare for Basic Cadet Trainingat West Point
Why don't Jews like the Christians who like them? James Q. Wilson notes that evangelicals are strong supporters of Israel, while mainline Protestant churches tend to oppose it.
Will immigration be an issue in the fall elections? Tiger
- Jim Miller notes that there was no laughter after these lines of Obama on Super Tues:
We have to choose between change and more of the same. We have to choose between looking backwards and looking forwards. We have to choose between our future and our past.
The 35 things you should 
Guess which 
Photo: the famous 
We recently mentioned that the Three Basic Food-groups consist of Chips, Dip, and Beer. Mr. Free Market 
Here are some 
Thoughts about John McCain. As somebody said on the radio, "I would crawl over broken glass to vote for McCain over Hillary Clinton." McCain is not a Conservative ideologue, but he is a Conservative. When it comes to immigration law, I see no Liberal-Conservative ideology issue at the heart of it; only a Dem-Repub issue. When it comes to McCain-Feingold, McCain was way wrong on the spirit and word of the Constitution. His CPAC speech yesterday is 
He called for the United States to become energy secure, because "America must never be held hostage by the likes of Putin, (Venezuelan President Hugo) Chavez and (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad,"
Retiring from the field 