Wednesday, May 19. 2010
I have a small, humble art gallery online. In it, I have a "Fun With Nature" category, full of pictures of animals acting silly and all the rest.
Among the pictures is this one, with my caption:
Idiocy knows no bounds
Yep, just another dumb animal doing something completely incomprehensible to humans.
All of which shows how much I know.
H/T: Theo
Sorman at City Journal.
California is going to be left without anybody to pay the bills.
Freedom gets in the way of Progress. We need enlightened dictators, Plato's Philosopher-Kings.
Perfectly fine with me as long as I get to be the Philosopher-King and not you. I am an elite and would make a fine, plump Mandarin - except that I don't like to hold power. Plus I don't believe in the notion of Progress either (except in the most trivial sense), but that's another topic.
Harsanyi discusses in Enlightened tyrants - Is freedom getting in the way of "progress"?
My good friend, Captain Wayne Beardsley, with a 35 pound Mahi Mahi caught 50 miles West of Puerto Rico off the stern of his 49’ Grand Banks Classic “Long Legged Lady.” He caught it using a classic form artificial squid streamer on a Ugly Stick 8’ fly rod and Van Staal C-Vex reel with weight forward #8 line tipped with 20 lb fluorocarbon leader.
The Mahi Mahi, also known as Dolphin or Dolphinfish, is one of the prized sport fish which also happens to be an excellent fish for dinner. Commonly found in temperate, tropical and sub-tropical waters, mahi are voracious eaters and will swallow almost anything from crustaceans to larger bait fish. Fishing for mahi is somewhat rare up here in New England, but in late summer when the waters are warmer and/or the Gulf Stream wanders in closer to the coast, mahi can be hiding and/or hanging around weedlines, floating objects like trees, loose buoys and/or anchored navigation buoys.
Down south, looking for bird activity around floating structure will usually indicate the presence of mahi – in open ocean, you can bet on it. In shore, it will be hit or miss – watch water temps for warmer than normal levels and inspect the floating structure for weeds and incrustation.
Rigging for Mahi on either spinning gear or fly is fairly straight forward. 7/8’ Medium to Medium Heavy rods with quick (fast) taper, sufficiently heavy large capacity reels like the Penn 460 large spool series or the above mentioned Van Staal and 30/50 lb mono with fluorocarbon leaders for spin and #8/9 forward weight fly line will survive a good fight. Bait throwers will do well with large spinner baits and fly throwers will always find that Clouser imitations, white or fluorescent, the larger the better, will always work if you can find the fish. They are an incredible aerobatic show and their colors will dazzle you (but fade rapidly at death).
Cautionary note on Mahi. They are considered a moderate mercury fish so limiting your intake to once or twice a month is a good idea. They can be a carrier for ciguatera poisoning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciguatera) which has some flat out nasty neurological and physiological effects. Open water fish are generally ok, but those caught in/around reefs should be considered suspect.
"There's no such thing as a single lie."
Via Wizbang's A Tangled Web. It's not just that one lie leads to another; it's that liars tend to lie. It's part of who they are. See People of the Lie, a book about which Amazon quotes:
Scott Peck is a psychiatrist turned author and lecturer. His name is a household word with the self-help crowd. In People of the Lie, Peck takes on the topic of evil. The"volume" cited is not an abridgment but a group of case studies from the first chapters of the book, along with commentary. The presentations are consistently well done. Peck reads with a soft, yet strong voice that is both self-assured and reassuring.
The Critz vs. Burns "failure" is a disappointment, even in a 2:1 Dem district.
What the Dems have begun to master over recent cycles is to run as Conservative-sounding centrists. When they get to DC, however, they end up, willingly or unwillingly, under the thumb of the Pelosi leadership. That's how our system tends to work.
So whether they run with more conservative local themes or not, in the end it doesn't matter. In the House, it is Party that matters, 99% of the time. That's why voting Party instead of Person makes sense most of the time, and why, for federal elections, being an Independent, even though it sounds nice, just means you don't care.
 The moral life of babies
Chuck Schumer vs. Free Speech:
As we noted in our amicus brief supporting Citizens United, the FEC now has regulations for 33 types of contributions and speech and 71 different types of speakers. Regardless of the abstract merit of the various arguments for and against limits on political contributions and spending, this very complexity raises serious concerns about whether the law can be enforced consistent with the First Amendment.
Pat Buchanan: Greece should default
Attack Machine: Has Obama made enough money?
Chris Shays watched Blumenthal go down that road
Is the O all about sex appeal? Am Thinker
A new holy site? Second mosque planned in shadow of ground zero
Does free trade make humans human?
Because they are so good at running things? Chris Matthews Wants Obama to “Nationalize” The Oil Companies
Got Kleenex? How Hugo Chávez broke my heart. She says she is an "idealist." Meaning reality does not overly concern her.
China does not want to be part of the Post-War World Order. I can't blame them for that.
Who owns the USA? Nice of them to let us use it.
Texas doctors opting out of Medicare at alarming rate
The collapse of private insurors is not a bug, it's a feature: Medical insurance in MA
Tuesday, May 18. 2010
 Thanks for reminding me about FFA and 4-H. We had a 4-H when I grew up, but I did not belong.
Where did those good things go?
I have been working on ways of talking about personality traits and relationships which avoid all psychobabble, fancy convoluted theorizing, and obscure terminology and latinate or greekified jargon. That means trying to invent better, more intuitive, metaphors. This is just a first draft to help get me thinking about what it is I really want to say -
 For 40 or 50 years, Psychiatry and especially Psychoanalysis has tended to view the formation of a person - their pathology and their normality - as being founded in their relationships during development. I do not agree with that premise.
However, as a shrink I am naturally interested in peoples' relationships. It's one of the main topics I listen to, and it is one of the main arenas in which people live out their personality tendencies, for better or worse.
A patient of mine, 59 years old, was married at 21 to his high school sweetheart on their college graduation. He comes to me because he has let himself fall in love with a younger co-worker in his office, and feels torn up with the conflicts. So torn up that he cannot work or concentrate. He is an entrepreneur and has built a series of multi-million dollar businesses during his life, some successful, some not.
Naturally, I inquire about his marriage. A picture gradually forms in my mind of a relationship which is frozen in the past. Two young folks, mad about each other, created a romantic relationship template - their manner of relating and interacting at the time - which has neither changed or grown much since then except, of course, a marked cooling of the passion. Meanwhile, everything else in life has changed: raising kids, financial ups and downs, deaths of parents, new activities and new friends and relationships, etc.
The relationship model that worked at 20 didn't do much at 59, but they unwittingly clung to the original template they had formed early on.
Everybody has had the experience of seeing an old friend after many years, and thinking "Gee, we picked up just where we left off ten years ago." Or, even more commonly, "I feel a bit like a 14 year-old or a 16 year-old when I spend time with my parents."
It's neither a good nor a bad thing; it's just a fact that we have a limited number of relationship templates on hand to apply to our different sorts of relationships, and we tend to keep using the same ones.
Often, in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, this is termed "transference." I just call it recycling of old templates. Mental efficiency, however imperfect.
Sometimes we are forced to form new ones, regardless of our age. Getting a new sibling requires a new one (an evil and unwelcome interloper), becoming a parent requires new ones, as does becoming a grandparent or an in-law. New love relationships sometimes do, but more often tend to draw on past templates, modified a bit, and superimposed on a new relationship. Even a new house dog demands a new template (unless one imposes one of one's human templates on the relationship - as I do. I seem to use my "toddler" template for dogs.).
Sometimes we do things on purpose to create new, more mature or more satisfying templates for our arsenal, or to adjust old ones (relationship templates have wiggle room on the edges). That's one of the purposes of marriage encounter, marital therapy, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, etc. Much of what can feel sterile in relationships is our clinging to old templates - clinging for comfort and familiarity.
People usually form new relationships on their pre-existing templates, and the lack of perfect "fit" of mental template to reality is what makes for all the fun and challenge and mess. (You can generalize that metaphor to lots of things in life...most of what we do and how we do it is from an existing pattern.)
Humans stick to their patterns most of the time - creatures of habit - and usually prefer venturing outside of them (adventure) to a limited extent - just enough to keep it interesting, depending on where one falls on the timidity-recklessness spectrum.
More later about what our templates are made of...
Update from Pajamas here.
Standing guard duty in Texas. Thanks, Buddy.
I have attempted to make the case for that fact many times here. Among other data, a post with the above title offers this:
“of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate over the next decade in the United States, only seven typically require a bachelor’s degree.”
Popular CT Democrat and senatorial candidate Richard Blumenthal outed as a first-class snake and liar. Link fixed.
Also, the excellent CT Attorney General candidate Martha Dean has been saying these things about Blumenthal for years. She's a Repub, so nobody listened. See Martha Dean for AG. I have met her. She is great.
 They lent us the money, so it's their fault: Greece Considering Legal Action Against U.S. Banks for Crisis
Reason: We Are Out of Money -American governance won’t begin to inch forward until the political class faces basic facts.
Less Than One-Third of US Meteorologists Believe In Manmade Global Warming
More Moslems in bikinis, please
Bruce Walker: The Left's War on Free Speech
The wrecking of Venezuela - Venezuelans are starting to fall out of love with their president. Will they be allowed to vote him out of power? h/t, Fausta
From Black and Right's Obama’s Risky ‘Southern Strategy’ II,
With the latest crisis that can’t go to waste, the Obama Administration is now using the Arizona immigration law to codify the Latino vote against Republicans in an attempt to save the Democrat majority. I guess one could say it’s ironic that the same party that excused its own segregationist past by revising the intent of the ‘Southern Strategy’, has now implemented its own.
Obamacare: “Is the Cure Worse than the Disease?”
Samuelson: How Much Should the Government Spend?
Vanderleun finds the bullshit in the gelato
Kinsley tries to explain why the Tea Partiers are much worse people than the 60s protesters. Lame.
Globe: Health care fails small businesses. Related, A Technocrat's Fantasy - and our nightmare
Why does the O avoid the press?
Monday, May 17. 2010
From Ranson in the WSJ, The Revenue Limits of Tax and Spend:
...this year the U.S. government declined to lay out any plan to balance its budget ever again.
and
The feds assume a relationship between the economy and tax revenue that is divorced from reality. Six decades of history have established one far-reaching fact that needs to be built into fiscal calculations: Increases in federal tax rates, particularly if targeted at the higher brackets, produce no additional revenue. For politicians this is truly an inconvenient truth.
Read that whole thing. Related: States’ Tax Collections Falter, Widening Budget Gaps.
From David Warren's Making Things:
In his heart, the hyper-modernist not only still believes in progress (or, "hope and change") in the face of all evidence to the contrary. He also deeply believes that nothing matters, because everything is going to change anyway. Hence his inability to make anything worth keeping.
We have a society that ought to be haunted by Chartres: by the fragments of our landscape over which great steeples once rose, declaring truth in stone meant to outlast ages. Instead we look around at a clutter of cheap franchise operations; and traffic accelerating from nowhere to nowhere.
Yellowfins hitting a school of baitfish. More photos here.
Peter Beinhart’s essay in the leftwards, critical of Israel New York Review of Books, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment”, is garnering praise from the usual quarters for asserting based on a seven-year old focus group that younger American Jews are not as committed to, even conscious of, Israel as their elders. Beinhart: “One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens.” The mission: “Saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish challenge of our age.” Beinhart’s “liberal Zionism” is difficult to distinguish from that of ultra-left Jews who bash Israel or demur to the bashers and apologize for Obama’s dangerous domestic and foreign inanities.
In effect, Beinhart is saying that he wants to export American liberal illusions to Israel, which would increase the support for Israel among liberal Americans, Jewish or other. Beinhart’s cure for the failure of American liberals’ illusions is to enlarge the illusion by blaming its failures on those who live in the real world for not embracing it.
There’s another approach to criticizing much of the American Jewish leadership. They forget when liberalism entailed recognizing the difference between friend and foe, and cling to liberalism’s current inability to be willing to deal with unaffordable largesse and unpersuadable enemies. Most are in schizo crisis between their attachment to the Democrat Party and their own access to the halls of power versus their recognition that it has become an undependable ally of Israel.
Israel is successful, exists, because – aside from a vocal but tiny minority clustered behind Ivory towers – it prospers due to the breakout of entrepreneurs from past socialist dominance over the economy and it endures due to being willing to fight when necessary.
Beinhart is simplistically blind to his and fellows’ priority in being part of the liberal herd, regardless the consequences. Following the Beinharts of American liberalism is to leap with the lemmings.
P.S.: Another critique.
People who value money are not the successes on Wall Street or in finance. The real successes are the people who don't value money. Yes, the money-grubbers and the money-counters and money-hoarders are necessary and often do OK and buy nice cars and have money for retirement and second and third homes, but I think the real successes on Wall Street are the ones who want to build things and to make things happen, build businesses, try new ideas, take big risks, fail a few times, and can say 'the heck with my money.' I think that is success on Wall Street. The builders and the dice-rollers who aren't into money and just like to do things.
A patient of mine, a retired Wall Streeter, who has gone back to work to raise a hedge fund with a friend for which the company profits will go towards starting small businesses in Africa and Haiti. Retirement did not suit him.
 I put in my tomatoes, cucumbers, squash seeds, herbs etc. I think we're done with the frosty nights, finally.
I also fertilized my Money Tree, and planted a row of Beer Plants (cover your empties with about 2" of soil spaced about 6" apart, water, and wait). I like to time my Beer Plant planting every two weeks so there is always a fresh crop throughout beer season. I planted some Coors Lites, the usual Rolling Rock, and a couple of Sam Adams. In two weeks, I will plant some Guiness and some Old Milwaukee. Maybe some Ballantine Ale too.
Gardening is one of the few ways to get untaxed value.
Sunday, May 16. 2010
Woody Allen: "It Would Be Good If Obama Could Be a Dictator for a Few Years".
As he sometimes does and has done, usually with humor, Woody captures a certain arrogant, elitist, Upper-West-side Manhattan world view of the world. I, for one, at this point, find it despicable, hateful, and anti-American. Furthermore, it shows a condescending contempt for relatively decent and ordinary people like me.
With the history of western Socialist dictator-types - Robespierre, Bismarck, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, etc, it is remarkable to me that somebody like Woody would long for another.
Heck, maybe we could have a utopia if I were dictator for just a few years. I am fairly intelligent, Ivy-League educated, and knowledgeable, and have lots of experience about how things work in the real world (far more than most career politicians), and I have informed opinions on almost everything too.
Problem is, I have no interest in having power over anybody else. I hate power, except over my own life. I have studiously avoided power during my entire fairly-successful career, and have refused a number of offers of power, large and small. Power over others is revolting to me. That's why I post on Maggie's Farm.
Woody's attitude is just freaking amazing to me, and says a lot. As much as I enjoyed Sleeper, I am done with the guy. He had no morals anyway but I tend to give "artists" a little leeway. Why? Because I am stupid and like to be entertained.
Authoritarian Leftism is a sickness, and as evil as sociopathy. Maybe it is a form of sociopathy. I don't know. These people need to learn a little humility...and a few other things too.
MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) brings us an exceptional debate in Kuwait over whether a performance in Kuwait of the internationally enjoyed song Hava Nagilah, performed by all races and nationalities, should be forbidden as legitimizing Israel.
What makes the debate exceptional is that, for a change, more than one side is heard in an Arab country. Highlights of the debate are below the fold. Worth reading. (Or, be doomed to endlessly dance to the Macarena.)
Meanwhile, here’s Harry Belafonte sharing the song’s joy with an audience in Italy in 1988.
Translation of the objectionable lyrics:
Let's rejoice
Let's rejoice
Let's rejoice and be happy.
Let's sing
Let's sing
Let's sing and be happy.
Awake, awake brothers!
Awake brothers with a happy heart.
Continue reading "Debate In Kuwait: What's Wrong With Hava Nagilah?"
|
