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.
Here's some art: This is Truth and Repentance, a detail from Botticelli's allegorical The Calumny of Appelles. Interestingly, this was Sandro's last secular painting. He became a Renaissance reborn Christian. How that happened I do not know.
If surveys conducted by physician recruiting companies accurately reflect current trends in the job market, the news is very good for psychiatrists—and less promising for many patients with mental health disorders. Chief among those who may not receive the psychiatric care they need are children and adolescents and people who live in areas that are not densely populated.
Also,
The Bureau of Health Professions predicts that demand for general psychiatry services will have increased nearly 20% between 1995 and 2020. The Bureau also foresees a 100% increase in the need for child and adolescent psychiatric services during that period.
I think one of the reasons that fewer American medical students are going into Psychiatry these days is because it is turning into more of a pill-pushing and check-list diagnosing specialty than the "understand the whole person in depth" specialty that I became interested in.
Although it seems to have been overlooked by the media, it is hard not to conclude that Islamist acts of terror are not usually preceded by specific threats, and Islamist threats are not usually followed by attacks. This is basic psychological warfare, and usually works well – authorities in target states must not ignore the threats, and defending against the threat of attack for an indeterminate time frame is costly as well as stressful.
Principles are what counts. So stop trying to outdo us by rushing to the microphones with a silly plan to solve every social ill this side of halitosis whenever our pet frogs in the media croak about a new “crisis” in the daily news feed. In fact, forget about programs completely. Just say no! And if we call you out and demand to know — which we will, you can bet on that, it’s part of the playbook — the details of your “plan,” laugh and tell them to shove it and start talking about principles.
To do otherwise is to accept our premises, which means you have already lost. Instead, stick to the big picture: liberty, self- reliance, faith, freedom. Those concepts are to us like a crucifix to a vampire, but heed not our squeals. Instead, keep brandishing your integrity and have the satisfaction of watching us collapse, writhing, on the floor into a puddle of putrescent malefaction, just like Christopher Lee in all those great Hammer movies.
One of the most interesting features of the show was Dylan the DJ, or his persona as a DJ. He never denied who it was behind the microphone, dropping, here and there, little jokes or anecdotes about his life as a musician among musicians. With his choice of themes, listeners learned, among other things, that the Bob Dylan who decades earlier wrote a song about the New York Yankees pitcher Catfish Hunter remains very much a baseball fan, enough so to offer his own a cappella singing of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” on his show entitled “Baseball.” But Dylan also took on a role, as a disc jockey from out of the past but also as instructor of music appreciation, biographer, comedian, commentator, and dispenser of recipes, household hints, and other bits of useful information.
It must be some failure of multicultural education in the West when we imagine that other people in the world want what we want. Things like peace, material well-being, freedom, etc.
Munich in particular illustrates the dangers of projecting one’s own motives or goods onto an aggressor. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain failed to imagine that Hitler and the Germans, fired by revanchist passions and the lust for recovering lost prestige and power, were eager for conflict and had spent most of the interwar period preparing for it. Worse yet, this ignorance of true motives puts one at a disadvantage when dealing with an aggressor, who can conceal his aims under the pretext of diplomatic negotiation (as Hitler did), thus buying time and misdirecting his adversary by the duplicitous endorsement of ideals he knows are important to the West.
Yes, you could make a case that the Sudetenland was part of Greater Germany - Austria too - but that's not what it was about.
Thornton's piece is mainly about militant Islam. In the West, we often prefer to be in denial of the evil intentions of others. I'm sure there is a psychological explanation for that. To me, it just seems like a pleasant Edenic fantasy.
In 1939, about 5,000 copies of a book offering hopeless drunks a spiritual path to recovery through 12 steps were released by a fledgling fellowship of alcoholics.
"The enthusiasm gap is real," said Rodd Freitag, UW-Eau Claire political science professor. "I think younger voters may be experiencing the frustrations of seeing our political system at work, of not getting everything you want immediately. The euphoria has gone away."
McDonald's Corp. has warned federal regulators that it could drop its health insurance plan for nearly 30,000 hourly restaurant workers unless regulators waive a new requirement of the U.S. health overhaul.
The move is one of the clearest indications that new rules may disrupt workers' health plans as the law ripples through the real world.
Judged by his own standards, however, Obama has good reason to take pride in his record. For his presidency already has accomplished a historic transformation of American government. Thanks to his victories on the bailouts, health care, and financial regulation, government's size, cost, and agenda have swelled enormously and are set to expand further over the long term. Obamacare may be controversial, but it's the law now. He's succeeded in what many liberal commentators and politicians, and most conservatives, too, thought impossible—launching a fourth wave of liberal social reform, adding to the storied legislative accomplishments of the New Freedom, the New Deal, and the Great Society.
and
Among its other effects, this act marks a new stage in the decline of constitutional government in America. One sign of this was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's remark, "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy." After shepherding the equally massive financial regulation bill into law, Senator Christopher Dodd was moved to say something very similar: "No one will know until this is actually in place how it works." In late August, Senator Max Baucus, Finance Committee chairman, chimed in: "I don't think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the health care bill....We hire experts." These statements make both an epistemological and a political point. The first is that these bills are so long, complicated, and unreadable that no one who isn't an expert can possibly decipher them. That implies, in turn, that no amount or quality of democratic deliberation can clarify them to citizens, and in most cases to legislators, in advance. Indeed, Pelosi suggests that political debate itself, "controversy," mostly dims public understanding by generating "fog." The second point is that neither she nor Dodd nor Baucus is especially troubled by this breakdown in democratic accountability. With this kind of legislation, they imply, there's no choice but to trust the experts—not merely those who patch the law together, but perhaps more importantly those who implement it. For the truth is that this kind of bill, almost 3,000 pages long, will mean what the bureaucrats say it means.
Or if one wants to be generous, this kind of bill will mean what the bureaucrats, in conjunction or conspiracy with their congressional overseers, say it means. In short, these bills are not so much laws as administrative to-do lists. They are contrivances fit only for the modern liberal state, ambitious to regulate all local and state affairs from the center, which means through a bureaucracy of experts or so-called experts. The result is not a government of laws but of men, albeit men who think themselves wise.
Read the whole thing. It is clear that the Dems were and are willing to risk losing any or all control in Congress in exchange for getting this done. As Kesler says, they are playing the long game, and this version is just a beginning. It's meant to fail, and they will rescue it with their next step. If they had been more clever and had chosen a less circuitous route, they would have simply planned on Medicare For All. People love their Medicare.
It's worth losing a battle or two to win a war. For the Left, it is war and they really don't mind the short-term sacrifice of some pawns and a bishop this November. It's just a predictable bump on the road to utopia, and I do not think they really care too much about it. They already have the golden fleece: our bodies.
We have no "insurgency" in the US now. What I think we have is a reaction to governmental overreach - an overreach which, as I posted yesterday, will only with time ratchet ever upwards until it breaks.
What did the guy say? "Tighten the bolt until it breaks, then back off a little."
Being a Constitutional Conservative is a depressing role.
The American government has become a gigantic regulatory juggernaut. It decides the fate of individuals, businesses, whole industries, and entire regions. A few lines in a statute, or a paragraph in one of the many administrative codes that enmesh our productive lives, can mean wealth or ruin. This is a huge, unchecked, and increasingly unaccountable power. Where there is such power, as our Founders knew, it will be abused. Picking better people won’t solve the problem, because where such power exists, it will corrupt the people who have access to it. This is a political law almost as universal as those of Newton and Maxwell in the realm of physical phenomena. A regulatory state this powerful will necessarily be corrupting, venal, and suffocating.
OK, sure. But people voted for that stuff. What can anybody undo? Even Ronaldus Magnus could not take on the ridiculous and useless federal Dept. of Education. Megan McArdle mulls over government coercion, and exposes the straw man of Somalia. A quote:
Unfortunately, I don't have a Grand New Theory with which to replace it; I think of "society" as a chaotic system, within which government, like corporations, are necessary evils that will only ever imperfectly perform the idealized roles to which we would like to assign them. As such, I can't generate any neat sound-bytes like "Taxation is theft!" or "Why don't you just move to Somalia, huh?"
Nobody is advocating nihilism. I do have a grand theory, from Thomas Jefferson: "That government which governs least, governs best." A light hand. The Constitution remains a good idea, and it worked pretty well for a long time. We had a country of self-reliant, strong men and women and kids who took nothing for granted except that their lives were in their own hands, and God's.
And Matt Taibbi snarkily notes the Medicare Tennessee Tea Partiers in their government-paid scooters. I think that Medicare should have been means-tested, but that fight is long gone. The Liberal youngsters are going to pay my medical bills in a few years - if they can find a job. The joke is on them because, the way things are going, I have far more assets than they will ever have. Too bad it's not a joke.
I want to see old people. I want to see babies. I want to tell people their ugly children are beautiful. I want the ballgame to be on TV. I want the TV to be on a shelf over a bar.
I want to go to church on Sunday. I want to go to a bar on Friday night. I want to go dancing with my wife of many years on Saturday. I want to be buried in the same suit I was married in. I want people to stand there and look at my cold face and say I was no great shakes but I was alright.
I'll tell it to you while you are still warm, Sipp: "You are alright." I think it's a wonderful thing to know what one wants, especially when they are simple gifts.
...busy beavers in various corners of the federal bureaucracy are laying plans for new fiefdoms. Thousands of new employees are planned for various offices in HHS, including the new office to regulate private health insurance nationwide. The IRS is gearing up both to enforce with tax penalties the requirement that everyone carry government-approved insurance, and to help administer the massive new entitlement program that will require income verification on tens of millions of applicants. States will also be forced to build new bureaucracies to carry out the scores of tasks the federal government will be ordering them to perform.
Massive bureaucracy. Disinformation campaigns. Blatant power plays.
The funny thing is that conservatives are all aware of the power and presence of the old media, where beltway journalists wield influence and pretend objectivity when we all know they are 12-to-1 in the bag for the Democrats. But these same journalists, their fans, and their political allies all seem really perplexed at what’s happened to make a majority of freakin’ moron-Americans so very angry. It’s ironic that the people who believe they possess superior education, knowledge and wisdom seem quite a bit less informed than their adversaries about one of the great societal events of our time.
Congressman Calls For Schools To ‘Promote The Agenda’ Of Climate Change, Population Limitation. Maybe they can fool the kids.
That’s the ideal sentiment; the truth is that I enjoy the art of killing too much, and playing modern warfare games would reawaken how much I nostalgically miss the wargames, real and virtual, of my youth in Vietnam, as well as how much I envy, truth be told, the warfighting options available to youth today all over the planet…
Men were built to kill, rape, and to create general mayhem. Civilization is a challenge for us. Our only redemption is being touched by God.
No idea where this was. (thanks, Buddy). We photographed a scene like this (but without the bird-feeding) driving down from Whistler to Vancouver some winters ago. Awesome. Even the non-birders in our skiing group were impressed.
The eagles were like gulls. These greedy fish-eaters have no idea that they are symbols.
Freud's early studies of Hysteria led him (and Breuer) towards what is termed the Seduction Theory of neurosis - a trauma theory.
His eventual abandonment of Seduction Theory marked a deepening of Psychoanalytic respect for the role of fantasy - especially unconscious fantasy - as a shaper of a person's character and neurosis. His realization that memory, like all other mental activity, is shaped to varying degrees by thoughts of which we are unaware, was a key which opened many doors of understanding of human nature.
Thus the fad of ascribing mental illness and emotional problems to childhood trauma in the 1970s and 80s was a big Been There - Done That to Psychoanalysts.
Today, Psychoanalysts understand that trauma at any age is just one shaper among many, including genetics, unconscious activity, early relationships, ego characteristics and strengths and weaknesses, etc.
Re childhood sexual encounters, we know that the acceptance of this, or the disgust with this, is highly culture-specific. Whether that matters or not to the discussion I do not know.
In "My Lie": Why I falsely accused my father, one very destructive and suggestible person explains how she got caught up in the trauma fad. Freud, I imagine, would offer a grim smile of recognition at this story.
That's what William F. Buckley Jr. meant by "A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'"
The fatal flaw of democratic systems, of course, is that people figure out they can vote themselves things. The US wasn't planned that way, but it's become that way. Progressives call it Progress.
...what is it about self-styled intellectuals, “liberals,” leftists, “progressives” who loathe America and think that real progress exists in some far off land, preferably with top-down centralized state-run planning? During the first two decades of the 20th century, American men had built the first mechanized airplane and were spreading electricity throughout the nation, the first big radio networks were going up, skyscrapers were rising ever higher, affordable mass-produced automobiles were rolling off assembly lines, and nascent television technology was being created, all via private enterprise. But instead, the intellectuals of the period look to totalitarian nightmare states thousands of miles away such as the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s Italy, and want to cut and paste their ideas into the American firmament.
What is it about them? I believe I know what it is. Some folks think they are smart enough to run the world. Like Deval Patrick who regrets freedom, they want to be Philosopher-Kings. Trouble is, the mere fact of wanting that role is a sign of lack of wisdom. In my view, humility is the sign of wisdom, and hubris a sign of emotional immaturity.
As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.
We scoff at America and its media and especially its talk-shows, perhaps rightly so. But can one imagine The Road to Serfdom on Richard and Judy (or on Newsnight, come to that), or A Patriot's History of Britain anywhere? From where I stand, one American "shock jock" is doing as much for public education in politics and history as all the BBC's networks put together.
I would not term Glenn a "shock jock" unless basic, grade-school history is shocking. But maybe it is, and maybe it should be shocking. America was meant to be a shockingly new kind of thing.
Sean Wilentz, author of 
It must be some failure of multicultural education in the West when we imagine that other people in the world want what we want. Things like peace, material well-being, freedom, etc.
Fierce feminist lobbying
We have no "insurgency" in the US now. What I think we have is a reaction to governmental overreach - an overreach which, as I posted yesterday, will only with time ratchet ever upwards until it breaks.
It's been going on for many years, at least since Teddy Roosevelt: