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.
You spray a little stuff on the stains, then throw it in the dryer with the special paper thing. She says it works well for her skirts, jackets, and sweaters.
The Washington Times has the straight skinny on the downstream effects of our porcine federal government's expenditures. There's the usual stuff about billion dollar toilet seats without holes in them and so forth, but there's one gem hidden among the awful offal that makes the annual three trillion spree worth it. Oh, yeah. Shrimp on a treadmill!
Well, that's cooler than a HUD block grant, I'll say that much for it. But I gather everything the government does isn't nearly as essential as that.
Is "jello wrestling at the South Pole" a euphemism for something actually naughty? Or is it just dull, useless, ugly people wrestling in jello at great expense, in between bouts of fudging statistics about how hot it is in the Antarctic because I drive a four-door car? I'm sorry, it's hard to keep up with these hipsters. Next thing you know, you're going to tell me Pabst Blue Ribbon is popular again.
At constant fertility, Israel will have more young people by the end of this century than either Turkey or Iran, and more than German, Italy or Spain….The right way to read this projection is backwards: Israelis love children and have lots of them because they are happy, optimistic and prosperous….Europeans, Turks and Iranians, by contrast, have very few children because they are grumpy, alienated and pessimistic….
A new survey commissioned by the National World War II Museum in New Orleans found that 80% of respondents were found to have "little" or only "some" knowledge of the military holiday while just 20% of respondents claim to be "very familiar" with the day and its purpose.
No Democrat votes for any budget proposal -- Why Dems don’t want to present a budget: “The Peterson Foundation's Solutions Initiative brought together six think tanks -- two conservative, two liberal and two centrist -- and challenged each to present a detailed plan to solve our fiscal crisis-in-waiting, using the same uniform assumptions.” Read on
Before 1700s, dogs were considered vicious and disease-ridden
"Gentlemen of the jury, a man's dog stands by him in prosperity and poverty, in health and sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground, where the wintry winds blow, and the snow drives fiercely, if only he can be near his master's side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer; he will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounter with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wings and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens."
Supreme Court Upholds Arizona Law on Hiring Illegal Immigrants: “The decision did not involve an even more controversial immigration measure passed by Arizona lawmakers. That measure requiring police to check the immigration status of individuals in certain circumstances remains under separate legal challenge, and could likewise eventually reach the Supreme Court.”
The latest report by media watchdog group Just Journalism compared the coverage of Israel to the coverage of the “Arab spring” countries—Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia—during 2010. The group found that the attention given to the Arab spring countries (before the uprisings) was almost nonexistent….Israel was scapegoated as the root of Middle East unrest for years, while the oppression and corruption throughout the Arab world were largely ignored.
Mrs. BD is good with flowers and other things. It always amused me that she thought she invented flat flower arrangements until a flower arrangement judge informed her that her multi-level blue-ribbon construction was pave (with accent aigu), but inventively layered to a 6' height. Pave, once a popular avant garde style, is commonplace nowadays. It's good because it does not block cross-table conversation.
I was fortunate to recently hear a noted quartet play one of Brahms' masterpieces, his Piano Quartet in G Minor, Op.25, in an intimate setting. I am fortunate to live where there is plenty of live chamber music, and I am always happy to go listen.
I love chamber music as much or more than orchestral (too bad chamber music didn't have drum sets, though) but, with my tin ear and my slow brain, it takes me several hearings to get the structure, intent, and the direction of a composition unless I have studied it in advance. (Folk, blues, and pop are easy for my brain.) I mentioned this disability to Mrs. BD in reference to the G minor, and she replied "What do you mean? This is as clearly structured, developed, and disciplined a chamber piece as I have ever heard. The structure is transparent."
Listen to the whole piece for a day or two, if you need that as I do. It's a musical journey.
Here's just the familiar Finale, Movement 4 - the Rondo alla zingarese - a dance piece if there ever was one:
Mrs. BD and I have been taking the William and Mary course in Medieval History (with the delightfully Asperger's-ish Prof. Daileader via The Teaching Company) and we are enjoying it immensely. I do not like to sit unless I am at work, but this course gets me into a chair after work. (We live and thrive on the Teaching Company courses at my cottage, as readers know.)
The Prof says that the wealth of the Middle Ages came from a combination of trade and the renewal of currency in the form of the Italian Florin, the introduction of the heavy plow, the replacement of slavery with serfdom, a doubling of Europe's population - and the Medieval Warm Period which made it possible to grow better crops much further north than in the Dark Ages - and further north than today. Greenland was farmland.
The Warm Period was far warmer than the world today. People benefited. That's why we pray for Global Warming (but also doubt that humankind will be so lucky. With our luck, we'll get the next Ice Age and all be screwed except for Dr. Merc).
It was after morning recess in Mrs. Winter’s sixth grade class at Mapleton School. I remember the moment precisely, when the boy behind me, right in the middle of the lesson, leaned over his desk and my shoulder to whisper in my ear that if I’d take a nickel down to Woolworths at Broadway and Pearl, I could buy this fishing “thing” with which I could catch lots of fish out at East Dagues Lake.
Having sent Navy SEALs to kill bin Laden, do we propose to deal with Gaddafi by unleashing fierce lawyers at the Hague?...
Our current notions seem to reflect the cosmopolitan notion that we must care about everyone equally. In 2005, one of the leading theorists of cosmopolitan ethics, David Held of the London School of Economics, defined it this way: “Humankind belongs to a single moral realm in which each person is regarded as equally worthy of respect and consideration.” If you take this seriously enough, you will find it very hard to fight a successful war.
Gateway Pundit: “Like with everything Obama does, there’s no more than a two degree of separation between him and some America-hating leftist radical.”
VERY cool graphic: which supplements have evidence of working for various conditions, or not (go to "show me" tab on right side to see which work for which conditions; higher and bigger on the scale is better)
Neptunus Lex:" “Possible UN sanctions” for a Syrian nuclear plant that was destroyed almost four years ago? Talk about barn doors and fled horses.”
Surber: Lefty on the Lefties:“firebagging lefties constantly project on anyone with the temerity to question their paranoid conspiracy theories and character assassinations.” – There’s a HuffApp for that
Anomalocaridids. Say that 100 times, fast. They’d eat you or a distant ancestor.
Remembering The Brave. This slide show consists of photos taken at a formal dinner at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, VA. It is a beautiful presentation of the honor, commitment and pride today's heroes share with yesterday's.
Senate votes: Obama budget 0-97; Ryan House Budget 40-57 – Inching closer to facing the facts?
So one naturally asks: do the Democrats have something better to propose? The answer is: No. The Democratic Senate has not come up with a budget in two years, thereby violating federal law. President Obama has not proposed a replacement for his laughable FY 2012 budget, which not a single member of Congress is willing to support. The Democrats have no budget; no plan; no path out of the fiscal disaster into which they have led the United States. They are bystanders and political opportunists, utterly unfit to govern.
War is in some ways the most human of activities: it is about defining and achieving objectives in cooperation with some people, all-out opposition from others, in a contest that draws on every talent and tests every virtue that we have. Even those of us whose life plans do not involve storming up a hillside under enemy fire can learn from the way Clausewitz analyzes leadership and war. More, to ignore war in an education is to leave students ignorant about one of the central features of civilization and human life.
Long Live the Industrial City - New York City’s garment district illustrates that manufacturing can still be vital to the innovation that cities foster.
A quote:
Fashion is an intensely iterative process in which time becomes an obstacle. “When you move into higher-end design, there is so much spontaneous creativity happening that you don’t want to wait a month to see your garments,” says Tina Schenk, owner of the pattern-making company Werkstett. “One design is based on another. You want to keep the process going, you want to continuously look at the things that you’ve been designing.” Andrew Rosen, a third-generation garmento who founded Theory, a fashion company that now grosses half a billion dollars a year, remarks, “Just from an efficiency point of view, I can make clothes faster here. Which is not to say we haven’t shortened the lead times in China—we have. But there’s a lot more logistics that need to happen from 12,000 miles away than from 12 blocks away.” As Edward Glaeser notes in his new book The Triumph of the City, one thing cities do well is eliminate the “curse of complex communication.”
And as any Project Runway viewer knows from those trips to Mood Designer Fabrics, the massive garment district emporium where the reality TV show’s contestants scout for chiffon and charmeuse, it’s important to have the raw materials of fashion within easy reach. Fabric needs to be touched. “It’s not a flat medium you’re working in,” says veteran designer Anna Sui. “When you gather a piece of fabric, sometimes because of the thickness of it or the loftiness or the bounceability of it, you never know how it’s going to react.”
I still miss the blocks of garment racks blocking all the sidewalks over there, and the hordes of rude and crude "garmentos."
The weakness of all Utopias is this: that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motorcar or balloon.
G.K. Chesterton (h/t Dr. Bob, who seems to have quit writing)
Why New York's future is fleeing -- Actually, its future has been fleeing since the ‘60s and ‘70s. When I left, NYC was THE only crazy city to live, as sanity was sought elsewhere. The infection has spread to most other cities. Many of the NYC emigres carried it, along with their liberal politics.
The Dems' 'breathtaking' refusal to pass a budget: “The most amazing thing about all this, to Republicans, is that Reid’s abdication of responsibility has attracted so little attention. In a country drowning in debt, where’s the outrage?” – Senate Democrats:Bujeets! We don’t need no steenken bujeets
The Keynesian end point --The truth? "QE2 has created a massive new bubble in dollar-based financial assets, from stocks to gold. Meanwhile, it has had zero visible effect on the real economy."
How the Left Went Wrong on Islam: “The Soviet Union had tried to turn Muslim identity into a Communist identity. And that effort failed badly. The Communists remained infidels. Now we are trying to turn Muslim identity into a Democratic identity, and failing just as miserably.”
Prediction: In September, President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy blows up in his (and our) face(s). It’s totally obvious and yet no one is focusing on it.
I’m not referring to the Palestinian Authority’s bid for unilateral independence at the UN. I’m referring to the Egyptian parliamentary election.
It is totally obvious that in that election Egypt will elect a radical, anti-American, hate-Israel parliament which will then write the country’s new constitution….
On the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the United States will be watching the triumph of the ideology and movement--not Usama bin Ladin, of course, but his smarter counterparts--in much of the Middle East.
PS: Here's an excellent guide to Egypt's political parties so far which proves my point . Note that there isn't a single serious moderate party. Amr Mousa isn't forming a party while Muhammad ElBaradei, Obama's favorite, isn't doing anything but complain. There is a "Facebook party." So far it has 1000 "likes." Egypt has about 85 million people.
Bipartisan foreign policy: “House lawmakers from both parties are siding with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over President Obama in their differing approaches to the Israel-Palestine border dispute.” – Plus, Netanyahu gets more standing ovations than Obama, and without a teleprompter Netanyahu actually connects with authenticity.
C.S. Lewis once wrote that "of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." Rulers who just want to exploit us may relax once their greed's sated.
But "those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience," Lewis said.
They've been saying "The 60's are over" for years. And now, for Mr. Bob Dylan, they finally are.
Ol' Bob turns 70 today.
Pic: Not a recent photograph
There's a decent little article on him here, and lots of birthday links here.
Bob Dylan can agitate people — much like the way he used to when he was in his 20s and being branded as “Judas” for daring to play loud rock music to folk-loving audiences.
I'll say. Most people I knew would have been happy to put a knife through his eye for dragging an electric guitar onto the stage. In the world of folk music, there can be no greater blasphemy.
On the flip side, if it hadn't been for electrics, we never would have been blessed with 'Blood On The Tracks', my personal fave Dylan LP*.
*For those of you under 50, 'LP' stands for 'Long Playing', as in "record album", as in "vinyl", as in "precursor to the frisbee", as in "the worst form of storage media ever used in the history of the universe after aluminum foil canisters." However, simply because they were so fragile, we treated them like gold, thus imparting a certain feeling of 'personal protection' over our music stars; a feeling you certainly don't get in the throwaway world of CDs and memory sticks.
The way I see it, the reason Dylan successfully pulled off the switch to electrics is twofold. The main thing was that, even with electric guitars and drum sets banging away in the background, they still sounded like Dylan songs. Credit his squeaky voice and simplistic chord structure if you will, but it was actually a little deeper than that. Maybe it would be more appropriate to say that, despite the guitars and drums, his songs were still Dylanesque. That 'intangible something' was still there. And that, in the final analysis, was all that mattered.
But another reason is, while he used electric instruments, he never 'went electric' like the way so many bands did, bringing in moog synthesizers and fuzz guitar and electronic sitars and all the rest. He was still, in that final analysis, the quintessential Dylan we had known and loved for years.
Squeaky voice, simplistic chord structure, and all.
Well, so are all dog breeds, until someone gives them a breed name. But Brittanys aren't really true Spaniels (here are the main spaniel varieties - more of 'em than you might have thought), which is why we call them plain Brittanys. They are more pointers, or setters, or something. A mix of various random things that happened to come together well.
Who cares what you call them. In our neck of the woods, Brittanys are the best all-purpose dog for the field, and maybe the most popular gun dog. They point birds, they retrieve, they do not mind water retrieves; they are bundles of energy and affection, and they are easy to train - a cross look is usually enough to get your point across to these emotionally-sensitive critters. The larger American version can handle the large spaces.
But you need at least two of them. One Brittany isn't a fully happy dog. They need the exercise and the company they can give each other. Every hunter, or every human, can use a few sweet Brittanys around the place.
The audience:Wiseguy member of the media joked, “If he nuked Tel Aviv, maybe the Jewish vote would go down to 60 percent.” [He forgets that Reagan won 40% and Bush#2 35%, before President O alienated more.]– And, Jewish support for Israel is not declining.And, consciousness is rising. So, another solid 2008 O-group will not be so overwhelming in 2012. Ari Fleisher: “If Jews go 4-1 Democrat (as they did in 2008) Republicans lose, he says, but: If the Democrats win three to one it almost always tips it to the Republicans in Florida and Ohio.” – Isolationists among Republicans –Paul, for example- do not help, though.
There are journalism awards that honor great journalism. There are journalism awards with which one can argue. And then there are journalism awards that completely discredit the awarding entity itself. This is one of those latter category of awards.
“The Amsterdam court that is trying Mr. Wildersis engaged in a surgical operation for political purposes under the mandate of the Dutch ruling class. Its task is to excise the PVV leader from the Dutch body politic and restore the multicultural state to its previous dominance.”
Interesting parallels to today (1989 paper by a dear friend Miriam London, and wife to another dear friend Ivan London, both profs during my college days)
Like some Soviet experts before them, on whom they cast no backward glance, they were practitioners of the intellectual pseudo-faith of the century, dreaming up the City of Perfect Justice on Earth.
More useless gov't: “This is major expansion of government -- a separate branch of the Federal Reserve with immense powers to regulate "all consumer products." The excuse for it is bogus…”
Irony Meter Explodes: California, which imprisons 30,000 illegal immigrants, ordered to release 30,000 prisoners due to overcrowding – But, California likely to release the ill prisoners, who will then start collecting MediCal, shifting billions of costs back to Washington.
They've been saying "The 60's are over" for years. And now, for Mr. Bob Dylan, they finally are.
Well, so are all dog breeds, until someone gives them a breed name. But Brittanys aren't really true Spaniels (here are the 
