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.
He is talking about the subject of what we term "symptom choice." Of course, we do not generally mean that people set out to select a symptom, but we do mean that, except for those with serious brain disorders, the mind has only a set number of outlets for inner turmoil. Some of them are dysfunctional and some are not.
Many factors: cultural, personality-based, familial, genetic, etc. feed into the symptom "choice" of neurotics. I would say that eating disorders (which I view as a sort of obsessive-compulsive symptom) partake of all of the above. However, toying with an eating disorder because of fashion does not create a serious or persistent eating disorder. It's not like heroin.
It's a good day to take a nude dip off the stern of ye olde yacht.
Thanks to olde Mr. Sun, we have some summer heat going up here. No complaints. Photo below was the view from my deck this weekend. Watched a Red Fox hunting marsh voles out there early in the morning. He did catch one, too, with the cat-like pouncing they also use in the snow.
Photo below is Wellfleet Harbor - the outer harbor, really a bay within Cape Cod Bay. The Pilgrims stopped by, stole some Indian corn, and moved on across the bay to Plymouth where there was a Plymouth Rock, a Cumberland Farms, a Dunkin Donuts, a McDonalds, and a Pilgrim Welcome and Information Center with guys with funny hats:
In contemporary America, poverty is not so much a material condition as a spiritual one, often characterized by drug abuse, alcoholism, mental illness and illegitimacy. Until voters have a better understanding of what today’s poverty is and is not, it will not be possible to craft effective solutions to the very real problems–mostly behavioral–that afflict a significant portion of our population.
The End of the Growth Consensus - America added 44 million jobs in the 1980s and '90s, when both parties showed they had learned from past mistakes. The lessons have been forgotten.
Mix up a Martooni or two or a Gin and Tonic, and read and weep over the fecklessness of our political betters. As I have said before, I am worried about what the heck is going on and do not know anyone who is not.
The 70-Million-Check Constituency. It's about the delusion that "money happens." Money does not "happen" without people busting their asses in profitable work.
How to Contain the European Debt Crisis: Giavazzi and Kashyap. It is not a joke: the credit cards are at the limit, and the creditors are rightly concerned. If the big creditors blow up, we all blow up with them. Debtor nations are like suicide bombers, but at some point there is not enough money in the world to pay them off.
If Congress and President Obama, as well as the candidates who would like to succeed the president in 2013, maintain their silence, people should at least understand that the lousy jobs numbers are no mystery. They are the result of a policy that Washington has willfully chosen. As the Fed notes, the cost of this policy isn’t measured in dollars but in something more precious: time. Washington’s refusal to confront the debt problem is costing millions the most productive years of their lives.
That part is heart-breaking. But if you were or are an employer, would you be hiring now? We in CT are firing, not hiring, and not happy about it at all.
Never forget, never forget, and I think it’s very important for Democrats especially to remember this, that if Hitler had not come along, Franklin Roosevelt would have left office in 1941 with an unemployment rate in excess of 15 percent and an economic recovery strategy that had basically failed.
The Fear-Based Economy - Further tax increases could bring an already frightened, sputtering economy to a standstill.We are watching the dramatic and deliberate destruction of the economy, of jobs, and of enterprise, but you'd think, from the MSM, that it is business as usual. If you have kids, you should worry because crazy, ignorant people are running this thing and harming everybody who is not a government employee.
Having built a small business into a big one, I can tell you that today the impediments that the government imposes are impossible to deal with. Home Depot would never have succeeded if we'd tried to start it today. Every day you see rules and regulations from a group of Washington bureaucrats who know nothing about running a business. And I mean every day. It's become stifling.
So the utopians cannot accept the functionalist notion of government as a means of conducting vital functions on behalf of the people, rather than the utopian tool of transforming the people into a great society with seven academic degrees for everyone and recycling at every curb. Such a system is not a moral one to them and they are duty bound to resist it. And the functionalists similarly cannot accept a system that deprives them of agency by overlaying its political code over every aspect of their lives.
But it is the utopians and their economic policies who have forced their own moment to its crisis. Had Obama not won, they would have been able to comfortably sit back and blame Bush era policies for the mess. But their will to power also undid them. It gave them so much power that they are choking on it. With predictable blindness they exploited the crisis for all it was worth and are now left holding the bag. And their policies are now at the center of the debate.
But deeper still is the question of the place of government in the political and economic life of the American. This moment is a wake up call for a country that has been willing to avoid looking too closely at the fine print of the social programs and the total cost of the national debt. And the real question that drifts out of the debates is not about spending cuts, but about the role of government.
The utopian conception of government is not only a freedom deficit, but a functional deficit. The former is obvious, but the latter is often less obvious. The left is often dinged for its controlling ways, but less often for its incompetence.
Living in my new home state of South Carolina, I’ve come across some really interesting history. The story of building the Dreher Shoals dam impounding the Saluda River and creating Lake Murray is a real story of trial, error, engineering expertise and perseverance. Built to provide electric power to Columbia and a large section of South Carolina, the lake and it’s watershed is under the control of South Carolina Electric and Gas (SCE&G).
In addition to the interesting and varied flora and fauna, Lake Murray has a very interesting military history. Due to its rather unique layout, it was considered by General Jimmy Doolittle to be the perfect place to practice bombing runs prior to the raid on Tokyo. The target was Lunch Island – a small, 10 acre former hilltop located just south of the mid-line of the lake. Flying out of Owens Field in Columbia, the B-25s would circle North and start their runs from the North West. The United Stated Navy also used to practice torpedo runs on Lunch Island. Eventually, Lunch Island became Bomb Island and that name has stuck.
Post WWII and up until the mid-60’s, Bomb Island was partially used for recreational purposes – picnics and such. SCE&G would burn off the island occasionally to keep the brush down. It was around this time that Mother Nature decided that she would take control of Bomb Island during the summer and give it over to a bird called the Purple Martin.
The Purple Martin is a member of the swallow family and is the largest of the North American Swallows. It is primarily an insect eater and has the ability to maneuver like a fighter plane when munching down on mosquito’s, dragonflies, moths and other morsels it finds edible. Their migration pattern starts in early July to fly overland down through Mexico and into Brazil.They are related to the Swallows of Capistrano.
What is also unique about the Purple Martin at least in the Eastern US is that they seem to have made Bomb Island their summer home.Nobody has a solid reason for why this bird likes Bomb Island –speculation ranges from no predation to a certain kind of bush that they seem to favor for roosting.From late June through early September, the Purple Martins return to Bomb Island in the evening like clockwork right at sunset leaving in the early morning the next day.
I witnessed this entirely by accident on Monday evening. I was out on the lake planning on taking some sunset pictures over Spencer and Bomb Island.I grabbed some images of Spencer Island and zipped out to Bomb Island.When I got there, the viewing fleet was starting to arrive and I remembered the Purple Martins massing at sunset.To tell the truth, I was not quite ready for what I witnessed.
It starts about ten minutes before sunset – you see one or two swallows swooping along the water, zipping up in the air and back down again. Eventually, one or two become ten or twenty, then a couple of hundred.
Eventually, they mass above the island in a cloud of birds – it is simply an amazing sight as they form these huge vortexes of swirling birds.They swoop down onto the island and they back up again doing this a couple of times before it gets dark and they settle down on the island with a few stragglers coming in behind the main group. This image is about 1/8th of the island and the birds above it.I apologize for the lousy image but I was using a long lens wide open at 1600 ISO to get the shot.I’ll try and get a better one next time I go out there in the evening.
It is estimated that there are anywhere from 750,000 to 1,000,000 birds on the island over night at the peak of the season.There are so many birds that they have shown up on radar images from Columbia International Airport. Radar image credit - Clemson University Meteorology Department.
It’s an amazing show Mother Nature puts on over Bomb Island and it’s a lot of fun to watch not only the birds, but the fleet that shows up to watch the show.This whole spectacle has spawned a mini industry in taking people out to the island to watch the Purple Martins.
Oh, just to put paid to the evening, I got this image – it was quite an evening.
Going to college offered me the chance to play football for four more years.
Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.
Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.
I've never been able to understand why a Republican contributor is a 'fat cat' and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money is a 'public-spirited philanthropist'.
We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.
Latinos are Republican. They just don't know it yet.
No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!
Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15.
The taxpayer - that's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.
The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans.
Hearing that heat index makes you feel hotter, same as the wind chill factor makes you feel colder when you hear it. How about treating me like a reasonably intelligent person and just giving me the temp, the humidity, and the wind speed?
You don’t usually yearn for someone because of who they are, but because something about them triggers your needs. They’re rich or beautiful or make you feel very, very good. Friends, on the other hand, are usually great to be with because they don’t trigger strong needs, so you feel comfortable being yourself.
Wellfleet MA has a good harbor and a fair variety of boats. None of the fancy stuff like Newport or Nantucket, though. The town is not social enough to attract that crowd, but it is social enough for everybody to get in line for a Harbor Freeze cone on the pier every night after supper. (It is Mac's now, but I still call it Harbor Freeze.) I have seen people on that line from NYC that I haven't seen in 20 years.
There is plenty of dock space, and a large anchorage. It still has a small commercial fleet, more engaged in lobstering or in dragging for quahogs and sea clams than in fishing. The big-time fishing boats berth in Provincetown, where they have quick access out of Cape Cod Bay to the ocean.
I can not imagine living too far from the sea, and I feel that swimming in fresh water or overly-warm water is sort of disgusting. Chilly salt water is what works to cleanse and re-baptize my soul.
"Everybody has won and all must have prizes." That's the Dodo Bird Verdict.
Colleges, expecially private colleges, now hand "A"s out like jellybeans, and everybody is an honor student. Here's A History of College Grade Inflation.
When I went to college, an A meant "extraordinary distinction" in my Liberal Arts studies, and they were delivered like precious jewels. Probably 0-3% achieved that. Of course, in math and science it meant simply that you mastered all of the material in depth, and made no foolish exam errors. The wisest graders would overlook careless computational errors if the rest was correct.
Do normal guys like to hang out with guys and act stupid? Of course. In some ways, we never mature past age 7. In Teddy Roosevelt's case, age 6. Young women, often, do not comprehend the developmentally-arrested aspects of the male psyche.
We are a smaller blog, for sure - but not exactly a political blog. I am not sure what we are, which is why I refer to us as a boutique site despite the lame sound of that. Do we want to be Big? Darn right we do, but our audience grows in fits and starts. I think we need an Asian office.
One of my friends voluntarily attended an event recently, one that I wouldn't go to for a million bucks (well, maybe a million bucks). It was called Erasing White Privilege.
One of my favorite topics to get annoyed about here are the American (and northern European) food fetishes.
Indeed it is a symptom of prosperity that a civilization can obsess about what they eat rather than whether they eat. This occurrence is an anomaly in the short history of Homo sapiens. In the past couple of decades, many have fetishized their food as if what you eat were a major determinant of your fate in life (fatness aside - but recent studies say being fat isn't so bad for health either). "Eat this - it's good for you." Says who? Grandma? Brown rice and whole grains? Are you kidding me?
I have had four main categories of gripes:
1. What the latest research says. Eat Broccoli, then it's Avoid Broccoli. Avoid salt, but now salt is encouraged. Potatoes are carcinogenic. Avoid fats, but now it's avoid carbs (carbs will fatten you up and fat won't). My point is that whatever you read will be obsolete in a few years. Nobody on earth knows what the ideal human diet is, and that is because humans are basically opportunistic omnivores, designed to feed on whatever they can find.
2. "Supplements": A major scam and rip-off with a remarkable marketing machine, but I will not talk about that today.
3. "Genetic engineering": Unless you collect your food in the woods, pretty much everything you eat has been genetically engineered for thousands of years (except maybe mushrooms).
4. "Organic food": Back to clever marketing again directed to those who know no science or biology. Finally, Scientific American has a piece ripping apart the entire "organic" food fetish. Mythbusting 101: Organic Farming. Want to pay extra for "organic" for no reason whatsoever? Whole Foods shareholders thank you very much.
Sometimes I think that food fetishes must be a mild, verging on normative, form of eating disorder. I'll have my hot dogs with chopped onion and extra bright yellow mustard, thanks, with Lay's potato chips and a cold beer. Is there anything better on a summer day?
WHAT IS THE "CORRECT" AVERAGE TEMPERATURE? Don’t we need to know this first before we can determine what deviance is detrimental?
This is a question that used to have been answered. There is a period known as the "Climate Optimum" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum around 9,000 – 5,000 years ago. The temperature was up to 4 C warmer than now and the Sahara was fertile, supporting, if cave paintings in the central Sahara are to be believed, all sorts of animals including hippopotamus.
Holocene might be pleasant enough, but I don't even get the idea of a planetary average because, with so many climates on earth, and so many human-influenced microclimates, I would think an average would lack meaning.
Prof. Tim Groseclose tells the interesting story of his research on bias in American media, via Powerline. One quote:
At the University of Missouri, where my coauthor Jeff Milyo had just taken a job, the press office described our study in favorable terms and posted it on a prominent university web site.
Soon after the posting, the chairs of the humanities and social-science departments held a regular meeting with the dean. Although it was not supposed to be a topic for the meeting, our study soon became the focus of a heated discussion. The chairs of the departments of sociology, religion, and German and Russian languages were especially angry, and they called it “offensive” and “scandalous.” One said “The study isn’t research. It’s agitprop for the conservative blogosphere.”
The truth hurts: the MSM is agitprop for the Left, and has been for a long time. The Prof's tale, however, has a happy ending.
What's not to like? She is ready for a summer trans-Atlantic sail to Ireland on your vacation, or, better yet, a cruise to the Med via the Canary Islands, with a quick stop at Bermuda and the Windwards en route. (You can hire people to sail her back home to the US while you and your sweetie-pie First Mate - or second - wander around Portugal, Spain, and Morocco.)
It's been a long time since I have heard this one. It takes me back...so innocent. ""Kathy, I'm lost,' I said, though I know she was sleeping. I'm empty and aching and I don't know why..."
According to the government’s own survey data, in 2005, the average household defined as poor by the government lived in a house or apartment equipped with air conditioning and cable TV. The family had a car (a third of the poor have two or more cars). For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, a DVD player, and a VCR.
If there were children in the home (especially boys), the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation. In the kitchen, the household had a microwave, refrigerator, and an oven and stove. Other household conveniences included a washer and dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.
The home of the average poor family was in good repair and not overcrowded. In fact, the typical poor American had more living space than the average European. (Note: That’s average European, not poor European.) The average poor family was able to obtain medical care when needed. When asked, most poor families stated they had had sufficient funds during the past year to meet all essential needs.
Read it and weep, you all in Euroland. Mind you, the majority of American "poor" are mother-only households, too. Maybe our War on Poverty did work, after all, despite the minor detail that it enabled all of the single-parent families with unsupervised kids and alley-cat boyfriends. That's the Law of Unintended Consequences, or the Law of Incentives. Anyway, time to end that War. 40 years of antibiotics ought to suffice for the material comforts and conveniences.
Of course, there is more to life than that, the things money cannot buy and that no government can deliver. And, believe me, those HDTVs will get you get nowhere in life unless lazy and distracted is your goal.
Image is Norman Rockwell's vision of one of FDR's Four Freedoms, Freedom From Fear. In my view, the only Freedom From Fear would be a lobotomy, and the only Freedom from Want is death.
Those heavy volumes have become as obsolete as buggy whips.
I brought my 10+ year-old set of the Brittannica over to the book exchange, and they told me they were "household waste." That set was expensive.
When I was a student, I always looked up every topic in the Brittannica before looking at a textbook, to get the overview. I am lost without a broad overview.
Wikipedia just doesn't do it, no matter how handy it is for our website. You can subscribe to Britannica online.
Other corporations joined the plot, lobbying Congress to croak a product Americans overwhelmingly like and compel them to buy the more expensive substitute the industry was eager to sell them. The entire scheme, a lobbyist for the National Electrical Manufacturers Association testified candidly in 2007, was “at the industry’s initiative.’’ Unable to convince consumers to voluntarily abandon Edison’s light bulb, Big Business got the government to force the issue. “Of such deals,’’ remarks Bloomberg columnist Virginia Postrel, “are Tea Parties born.’’
The intentions of Democrats are only the best. They want all of the old to have lavish retirements, all of the young to have scholarships, verse-penning cowboys to have festivals funded by government, and everyone to have access to all the best health care, at no cost to himself. In the face of a huge wave of debt swamping all western nations, this is the core of their argument: They want a fair society, and their critics do not; they want to help, and their opponents like to see people suffer; they want a world filled with love and caring, and their opponents want one of callous indifference, in which the helpless must fend for themselves. (“We must reject both extremes, those who say we shouldn’t help the old and the sick and those who say that we should,” quips the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg.) But in fact, everyone thinks that we “should” do this; the problem, in the face of the debt crisis, is finding a way that we can. It is about the “can” part that the left is now in denial: daintily picking its way through canaries six deep on the floor of the coal mine, and conflating a “good” with a “right.”
Read the whole thing. America has become addicted to the Welfare State same as in Euroland. But if everybody is addicted to freebies, who is going to pay for it all? My favorite examples of Welfare, guaranteed to offend almost everybody who hates to think of it this way:
Government student loans Medicaid Medicare Social Security and Social Security Disability Government housing Home mortgage interest deductions Food stamps Federal Flood Insurance Farm subsidies and the ethanol program The entire VA medical system Federal Unemployment insurance and I did not even include ObamaCare, because I cannot understand it
With freebies - welfare - for all, you might almost think that America was a nation of incompetent leeches rather than a nation of proud, independent citizens who are capable of taking care of themselves and their own problems (unlike the Euroweenies with their serf-like approach to life). I am in one of these programs (VA - but I do not use it. Also, I paid off my mortgage already, foolishly, but think I will take a home equity line so I can get some tax deductions for these Obama years). Interestingly but not surprisingly, most of such progams increase the cost of the "good" itself via market distortion.
What are your favorite welfare programs? And what do you want the government to do for you with your own, and your neighbor's, money which it is not doing yet?
It's a good day to take a nude dip off the stern of ye olde yacht.
Mix up a Martooni or two or a Gin and Tonic, and read and weep over the fecklessness of our political betters. As I have said before, I am worried about what the heck is going on and do not know anyone who is not.
Home Depot founder Marcus: 
The Purple Martin is a member of the swallow family and is the largest of the North American Swallows. It is primarily an insect eater and has the ability to maneuver like a fighter plane when munching down on mosquito’s, dragonflies, moths and other morsels it finds edible. Their migration pattern starts in early July to fly overland down through 
Going to college offered me the chance to play football for four more years.
How animals 
One of my favorite topics to get annoyed about here are the American (and northern European) food fetishes. 
Mann has now written 
At 