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.
Got a car or truck with a sticky ignition, where the key won't turn even if you wiggle the steering wheel and move the key in and out a little bit, or turn the key in the opposite direction to loosen things up? Or, worse, the key doesn't want to come out?
It can be exasperating and, at times, embarassing. Apparently it can be due to slightly jammed lock cylinders, or the wheel lock.
Some suggest a squirt of WD-40 into the lock but I am wary about doing that. I wonder whether any of our car mechanic genius readers have any ideas, short of an expensive trip to the auto shop.
Marris argues that the cult of pristine wilderness was created by nature romantics like John Muir. Muir is famous for advocating that the Yosemite Valley be turned into a national park. As Marris notes, wild nature for Muir was a necessity for “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” suffering from “the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury.” And for some people it might be—but that is not a scientific claim about ecosystems and their “integrity.”
Tardigrades are the only cute little critters that I have not yet heard to be threatened by global warming, despite their cuteness and gentle natures. Perhaps they are neglected due to Sizeism.
These are tough little animals. More about them here. Good pets because they are almost impossible to kill no matter how much you might neglect them.
One thing that those romantic about Midwestern farms and factories tend to forget is that people hated working in those unionized factories, just as the young Harry Truman hated working on his father's farm. That's why the UAW negotiated "30 and out"—retirement after 30 years—with GM in 1970. With workers retiring well before Medicare age, the next union demand was the billions in retiree health-care benefits that more than anything else bankrupted the Big Three.
Michigan is an extreme example of what has afflicted the industrial Midwest. Big corporations were replaced by big government as the leading employer, and public-employee unions replaced industrial unions as the chief financiers of the Democratic Party. In effect, public-employee unions have been a mechanism by which taxpayer money, in the form of union dues, permanently finances a lobby with a vested interest in higher spending and less accountability. It's a lobby that's benefited from the Democratic Party loyalties of black voters, of Latinos in Chicago (the only large Hispanic presence in the Midwest) and of culturally liberal suburbanites.
This Midwestern model is unraveling before our eyes. The Midwest has not been hit as hard by foreclosures or unemployment as some other places, with Michigan an exception on both counts, but you have to look hard for green shoots of growth. They may be most evident in North Dakota, where low costs and light regulation have produced booms in energy and high tech.
But amid the recession, Midwestern Obama Democrats and their public-union allies lost their hold on voters in almost every Midwestern state, losing five governorships last year, including Iowa, and winning the Illinois and Minnesota governorships by less than 1% of the vote. A region that voted 54%-45% for Barack Obama in 2008 voted 53%-43% Republican for House candidates in 2010.
The movement to gradually destigmatize all social deviancies continues apace. For better or worse, we've come a long way from The Scarlet Letter.
I myself am a clinger. I cling to my antique cultural traditions, morals, codes, and religion as my life's foundations, and I lack the wisdom to opine about whether the destigmatizing of adultery, abortion, pornography, promiscuity, divorce (can anybody remember when divorce was socially shameful?), homosexuality, gay marriage, gay child-rearing, LGBTQ and whatever, prostitution, fetishes, many crimes, drug abuse, overtly antisocial behaviors (see all of the defenses of the UK's rioters), single motherhood, etc. is for the best or not. It certainly does represent a socio-cultural shift which some consider decadent. The notion of destigmatizing crime, for sure, seems like a big problem to me but there are significant subcultures even in the US who do.
The social acceptance of many of these behaviors seems to me to be part of the "therapeutic culture" which I, as an MD and practicing psychotherapist, find to be close to insane in its assumption that all would be perfect humans if not for inner conflict or external traumata. Sen. Daniel Moynihan, who I had the pleasure of talking to several times, defined many such things as "definining deviancy down."
Already, Moslem polygamy is sort-of overlooked in Western nations, and I see no fairness in not overlooking it in traditionalist Mormon families - or in anybody else who wants to do it. That's my Libertarian side speaking rather than my more personal, moralistic and Christian side.
Currently, the American Psychiatric Association has, under consideration, a proposal to de-pathologize Pedophilia. Why anybody in the general public cares very much about the opinion of this APA committee is beyond me, but many do. I doubt that they will have the political cojones to actually do that but, to get a little multicultural here, we have to bear in mind that pedophilia has been and continues to be culturally accepted in many cultures and subcultures - most famously, historically, amongst European royalty, the Greeks and Romans, the Moslems, and Africans, and currently amongst some Asian cultures and many Moslem ones. Prepubescent girls are for rent everywhere in south Asia. As a commonly-defined crime, pedophilia is found everywhere in the world.
Bonobo monkeys do it all, so it must be OK. Human fantasy and psychic reality may not be too different from Bonobo behavior.
In my opinion, pedophilia is not so much of a disease in itself as it is a crime - in our culture. It is a very good idea not to commit crimes even though supposedly everybody does, wittingly or unwittingly. In my field of Psychoanalysis, we still define culturally-deviant sexual behaviors as polymorphous-perverse or plain perverse, but even we - the supposed truth-tellers about the human heart - are subject to taboo PC pressures. It is interesting to see how taboos change, but never go away: now it seems that PC defines the taboos.
I remember a gay patient, years ago, who reported to me with some alarm that he had been dancing with a lady at a wedding and found himself feeling aroused and attracted to her. I joked with him that now he was revealing himself, in modern cultural terms, to have a real perversion.
The reality is that the "West" has finally reached the point of saturation wherein its economies and societies can no longer afford to guarantee a certain standard of living for the citizens of these countries in exchange for votes.
These nations have two factors in common: 1) they are all either confirmed to be or determined (as in the case of the United States) to become socialist democracies; and 2) they have evolved into overwhelmingly consumption-based societies, greatly diminishing their goods-producing sector (which generates the real wealth of a nation), thus eroding their job-creation ability as well as the nation's wealth and tax base. Yet the governments of all these countries continue to deficit spend, over-tax (chasing wealth and job-creation off-shore) and borrow in an effort to meet the expectations of the people.
The trick in this business is not to be right too early. A week ago I released my new book — the usual doom 'n' gloom stuff — and, just as the sensible prudent moderate chaps were about to dismiss it as hysterical and alarmist, Standard & Poor's went and downgraded the United States from its AAA rating for the first time in history.
... liberalism today lies in ruins, not only because it has indulged the cultural bilge that has given the looters their baseless sense of entitlement... but because it has failed, in its sanctimoniousness, to understand the necessary role illiberalism – guidelines, example, authority, boundaries – plays in the governing of society. It should never have happened that parents, teachers, and the police themselves, go in terror of the young, or in terror of the consequence of reining in their wildness. For the young's sake it should never have happened, never mind for ours. But the consequence is they are disinherited and we live in fear. In a society that is afraid to punish because it is afraid to judge, that does not understand the outrage of being offended against, that cannot feel the egregiousness of a crime, and that no longer even gestures at justice, it's no wonder there are people wildly calling for the return of capital punishment.
If the grownups don't provide the guardrails, who will?
It's not just for those of the gay persuasion anymore. For her birthday on Saturday, I took Mrs. BD down for dinner at Gradisca and then the last night of the ODC show at the Joyce (her picks, being her birthday).
The gentrification of the meat-packing district (high fashion, now), and the diversification (less gay-dominant) of the West Village and Chelsea (families, hetero couples and jolly groups of young blond gals with cute summer dresses everywhere) was fun to see. And people in the park, forgetting their troubles and woes...
We walked quite a bit - Hudson St., Jane St., Greenwich St., 13th St., etc., where the streets are confusing.
One thing is clear to me: The "fashionable upper East Side" is a dead zone. No fun at all. Stodgy, without vitality. These neighborhoods are not like that:
As I write in my book: “Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.” The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate. Marriage is all but defunct, except for William and Kate, fellow toffs, upscale gays and Muslims. From page 204: “For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.”
The issue at hand, it seems to me, is whether there are any real limits to federal power these days. Seeing as we were a nation founded on the principle of limits on central power, it's an important discussion, to put it mildly. Some say that debate was over many years ago.
When I think about marketing genius, I usually think of bottled water. However, maybe the marketing of vodka takes the cake.
Water and vodka lack color, flavor, and odor, so they both present formidable marketing challenges which Madison Avenue has masterfully overcome in the effort to persuade you to part with your hard-earned money.
"There are people here with nothing," this rioter continued: nothing, that is, except an education that has cost $80,000, a roof over their head, clothes on their back and shoes on their feet, food in their stomachs, a cellphone, a flat-screen TV, a refrigerator, an electric stove, heating and lighting, hot and cold running water, a guaranteed income, free medical care, and all of the same for any of the children that they might care to propagate.
But while the rioters have been maintained in a condition of near-permanent unemployment by government subvention augmented by criminal activity, Britain was importing labor to man its service industries. You can travel up and down the country and you can be sure that all the decent hotels and restaurants will be manned overwhelmingly by young foreigners; not a young Briton in sight (thank God).
It's about the unintended consequences of undiscerning compassion. Or, to be a bit more cynical, vote-buying. Genuine gratitude is the rarest of human sentiments.
Standing before a backdrop of graffiti, Cameron said Britain's damaged society had for too long been one which "incites laziness, that excuses bad behavior, that erodes self-discipline, that discourages hard work."
Honestly, close your eyes and try to imagine a scenario in which liberals would ever say that enough money has been spent, enough federal government power exerted. You will fail -- because there is just no satisfying liberals.
Some people become concerned with who and what they are, and some people just forge onward and never think twice about it.
To keep it simple, I'll tell you how to "find yourself." Engage the world in all the ways you can: socially, spiritually, economically, morally, avocationally in sports, volunteer activities, clubs, going places and doing things, and in hobbies.
By doing those things, the world will tell you what and who you are. Engaging reality is the best teacher. My experience teaches me that people avoid some engagments with the world because they do not want to learn what reality has to teach them about who and what they are.
Generally speaking, Prof. Reality teaches humility as its first lesson, and goes on from there.
A mechanic was removing a cylinder-head from the motor of a Harley motorcycle when he spotted a well-known cardiologist in his shop.
The cardiologist was there waiting for the service manager to come and take a look at his bike when the mechanic shouted across the garage..
"Hey, Doc, want to take a look at this?"
The cardiologist, a bit surprised, walked over to where the mechanic was working on the motorcycle.
The mechanic straightened up, wiped his hands on a rag and asked, "So Doc, look at this engine. I open its heart, take the valves out, repair any damage, and then put them back in, and when I finish, it works just like new. So how come I make $39,675 a year and you get the really big bucks ($1,695,759) when you and I are doing basically the same work?"
The cardiologist paused, smiled and leaned over, then whispered to the mechanic...........
What's the difference between Bruschetta (pronounced "bresketta") and Crostini? Here's one answer. And don't forget the crouton, which I like made with whole slices, not cubes.
And here's a quote from a piece in The New Statesman on bruschetta, Toast of the Tiber:
"The relationship between bruschetta and "garlic bread" is a peculiar one. In principle, bruschetta is the honest, poor man's original -nothing but charred, oil-soaked bread rubbed with garlic-while "garlic bread" is the embellished pretender. But somehow things have got mixed up. British democracy has confused them. Garlic bread became genuinely democratised, sold in dispiriting packs of two, or even four, for 99p in the brightest freezer cabinets. Meanwhile, the monied torchbearers of democracy - in fact, the elite - went crazy for bruschetta, paying a small fortune for pane covered in broad beans or anchovies at the River Cafe. And so, bizarrely, buttery indigestible garlic bread has come to seem unpretentious "people's food", while bruschetta is the poncy snack of the People's Party. This is an unfortunate state of affairs. Everything that is best about bruschetta -- its power to bestow well-being in one crisp bite -- is betrayed by garlic bread. To begin with, as Marcella Hazan points out: "The most important ingredient in bruschetta is not garlic but olive oil." The garlic on bruschetta is rubbed on, so that you inhale the fresh garlic perfume as a backdrop to the olive oil, rather than eating great lumps of it. The origin of bruschetta was probably the ancient Roman practice of tasting newly pressed olive oil on a piece of bread, with or without garlic -- a practice that has continued in the oil-producing areas of Tuscany, Umbria and Lazio. The name derives from bruscare, meaning "to roast over coals". Alice Waters's version of bruschetta involves frying country bread in large amounts of oil, until thoroughly impregnated, and Elizabeth David recommends baking slices of white bread in the oven."
Thus we learn that American "garlic bread" is not really Italian. The whole piece is interesting, and makes me wonder whether we American garlic-lovers - me, anyway - use our garlic far more heavy-handedly than we should. I will do Bruschetta this way:
Sourdough bread slices lightly fried in oil then garlic-rubbed, chopped fresh tomatoes barely warmed in a little oil with sea salt and maybe a touch of vinegar (plus maybe a little lightly sauteed onion) then fresh basil and parsley sprinkled on top. I think a sloppy Bruschetta is just fine if the oil and tomatoes are excellent, but I think I prefer a little plate of Crostini with a glass of wine.
In Italy we were served Crostini that were simple thin toasted baguette slices (garlic-rubbed with a little salt) with oil and some herbs (including Rosemary), others with a very light smear of pesto or goat cheese, and some others with just a little bit of sauteed shallot. Clearly the oil is the main point - and the wine. The oil has to be the best. Any added flavor should be subtle.
I think I prefer my Crostini lightly salted and fried in olive oil with a bit of garlic without any other flavor added on top. However, that would be properly known as the French "crouton." My family loves these fried slices of Italian bread or baguettes, and will eat them with anything. In fact, the Pupette makes then now, for snacks.
If you Google "crostini+recipe" you can find a ton of ideas, most of which I think are excessive.
Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Address, June 2005
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
(It's a short speech - continue reading on continuation page below)
Krauthammer's 
How to Survive 
How the flavorless, colorless, odorless spirit became a billion-dollar business
Image on right from Knish's 
Peter 