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.
Back at the barn after a long days' hunt today in the Hudson Valley with a pal and his business partner. Venison stew for lunch with a Bloody with extra horseradish, shot lots of birds over my pal's excellent Lab, saw three Bald Eagles (one of which, we suspect, stole a bird from our bird pile), smoked a cigar, had a few good beers and some very good conversation too. I shot quite well today, which I do not always do. I always find that an Irish Coffee or a Bloody helps my shooting.
Advent is hunting season too in this neck of the woods.
Thanks, pal, for hosting such a fine day. Les tres riche heures du Bird Dog, blessed as he is with good dear friends who like to do things. (On the other hand, he did chastise me, gently, a little for not monetising Maggie's Farm.)
The first keyboard I ever approached was an 1800s Mason & Hamlin single manual reed organ, technically a harmonium. The wind is generated by vacuum-generating bellows (hence "suction reed organ") pumped by the feet of the organist. From a technical standpoint, these are like upright accordions with an organ-like sound.
My Grandpa salvaged it when the local Congregational church bought a new organ. He kept it in his living room, and the elderly, old maid church organist would stop by, unannounced. to play the old thing until she died.
Today, old reed organs are thrown in the garbage, but I think it's a shame. They are of an era when these were all small congregations could afford. Some folks had them in their homes, too: "Parlor organs." You can find them cheap on eBay, but often people will be grateful if you will just take them away.
Did I mention that mice like to live in them? My parents finally threw the old thing in a dumpster because I failed to take it away myself in a reasonable period of time. My fault.
This fellow explains how to use the foot bellows to affect the playing of a reed organ:
The first tune I learned to play on it was the hymn Work For The Night Is Coming. It is not just a song of toil and death, but a song of toil in God's fields and pastures, and I still love it. Here's the only half-decent version I could find on YouTube (on piano, not reed organ - lyrics here):
In World War II, the United States did not have clear postwar goals for Eastern Europe. The brunt of this meant Eastern Europe suffered as Soviet satellites for almost half a century. The illusion of President Roosevelt about Stalin bears substantial responsibility.
The US held a moral stance toward eliminating Germany’s Nazi leadership and German rule over Europe. But, aside from desires, the US placed its eggs in the basket of a better postwar relationship with Stalin, rather than the freedom of Eastern Europe.
During the war, President Roosevelt had to deal with Churchill, who had a closer and clearer appreciation of the impact in Central and Eastern Europe of potential Soviet domination. But Roosevelt largely overrode Churchill. Roosevelt chose to deal with the paranoia of Stalin that (like Stalin had in 1939) the US and England would strike a deal with Germany short of its utter defeat. To the very end of his life, Roosevelt vainly believed, with vanity, that accommodating Stalin would yield trust and improved post-war relations. The fate of other peoples was secondary.
An illustration of Roosevelt’s haphazard policy making occurred at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943.
The firste stock-father of gentleness, What man desireth gentle for to be, Must follow his trace, and all his wittes dress, Virtue to love, and vices for to flee; For unto virtue longeth dignity, And not the reverse, safely dare I deem, All wear he mitre, crown, or diademe.
This firste stock was full of righteousness, True of his word, sober, pious, and free, Clean of his ghost, and loved business, Against the vice of sloth, in honesty; And, but his heir love virtue as did he, He is not gentle, though he riche seem, All wear he mitre, crown, or diademe.
Vice may well be heir to old richess, But there may no man, as men may well see, Bequeath his heir his virtuous nobless; That is appropried to no degree, But to the first Father in majesty, Which makes his heire him that doth him queme, All wear he mitre, crown, or diademe.
Gentleness meant "gentility," "refinement," as in the terms "genteel," "gentleman," and "gentry." I think "queme" meant "please." Jeff Chaucer was a fascinating fellow, well-educated and well-travelled, a prosperous businessman of the Medieval merchant class (including a wine-import business in London). A writer on the side. We are fortunate that some of his work survived the years. Was he the Father of English literature? Sort-of, yes. I took the Chaucer course in college, and we read it all in the Olde English. Good fun. We read everything he wrote. Almost like learning a new language.
"Locus of control" is a psychological concept popularized and studied by psychologist Julius Rotter. It refers mainly to the extent to which a personthinks of himself as master of, or at least as prime determinant of, his life and fate. Captain of his ship, so to speak, or at least Navigator.
In America, we consider an "internal locus of control" as a sign of character strength (associated with determination, a can-do spirit, resilience, etc), and "external locus of control" as a sign of characterologic frailty (associated with blaming, excuses, scapegoating, dependency, complaints of unfairness, etc).
I say "in America" because some cultures support external localization while some cultures disparage the tendency to attribute unwelcome results to external forces, whether human, luck, God, or whatever. Northern European cultures tend towards the "no excuses," "take your lumps and learn from them" end of the spectrum.
Character is Destiny, or so claimed the ancient Greeks - and Freud.
People who tend towards the external side of things (in my field, we term it "externalizing," or "externalizing defenses") are often less successful in pursuing their goals. These are the people who are unlikely to admit "I screwed up," or "I was wrong," "I failed at so-and-so," "I handled that poorly," or "I don't understand it." The externalizing sorts of defenses are most commonly used to maintain a positive, or inflated, self-image in the face of disappointment but, on the other hand (revealing the internal contradiction) such people are the first to take credit for their successes and achievements.
The modern classic line which dramatizes the two ends of the spectrum is Jimmy Buffet's "Some people claim there's a woman to blame, but I know it's my own damn fault." In America, rightly or wrongly, our traditions respect those who say "It's my own damn fault" instead of blaming external circumstances, life history, bad luck, etc.
We preach that every move we make, or do not make, is a decision for which moral and practical responsibility must be taken, and the consequences of which we must man-up and deal with. Women must man-up, too.
The American ideal of self-reliance and self-responsibility comes into regular conflict with Christian views of God's will and evil forces, with ego-enhancing psychological defences, and also with dependency and victimization attitudes, ideologies and politics. It all keeps life interesting.
No, it's not about the Moslem immigrants; it's about government-enabled cultural change. His piece contains too many good points for me to pick just one quote.
“THERE IS NO MEANS OF AVOIDING THE FINAL COLLAPSE OF A BOOM BROUGHT ABOUT BY CREDIT EXPANSION. THE ALTERNATIVE IS ONLY WHETHER THE CRISIS SHOULD COME SOONER AS A RESULT OF A VOLUNTARY ABANDONMENT OF FURTHER CREDIT EXPANSION, OR LATER AS A FINAL OR TOTAL CATASTROPHE OF THE CURRENCY SYSTEM INVOLVED”
His problem is likeability and general unattractiveness. His appeal is his cojones. Does Mitt have any cojones? If he does, he had better pull down his trousers and show them to us now.
Unlike we libertarianish people, you people actually hold and have been holding significant political power in the US over the past 50 years. What have you done with this power? You’ve greased the corporatist machine every chance you’ve gotten. You’ve made things worse, not better. Our current problems are your fault. You need to stop.
The guy is a hopeless, spineless putz and an embarassment to Anglicans everywhere. I repeat: How many times did Christ say that he was not there for political purposes, despite the Jews' hoping that he would be a secular messiah?
Of the the approximately 15,000 registered glyphic texts found in different parts of what was then the Mayan empire, only two mention 2012, the Institute said.
"The Maya did not think about humanity, global warming or predict the poles would fuse together," said Alfonso Ladena, a professor from the Complutense University of Madrid. "We project our worries on them."
Nobody really believed that Obamacare would do anything to improve our health-care system or, even more absurdly, "bend the cost curve." By vastly increasing the number of insured and therefore of demand for medical care, it could only drive up costs. Remarks like Nancy Pelosi’s about having to pass the bill in order to see what’s in it showed that they weren’t really interested in what was in it — and nor was the President, who left all that up to congressional Democrats. What they cared about was the establishment of the progressive principle that the government should be in charge of overseeing health care. The details would be worked out later as history pursued its inevitable course of increasing government control over people’s lives.
Leftists take the long view, the Gramscian approach. At one bite at a time, their growing Leviathan wants to consume all that it can of private life in America. It's never enough, and never will be.
That's the essential problem: there is no end-point.
Freeman Dyson discusses Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slowin the NYRB. A quote:
(A) theme of Kahneman’s book, proclaimed in the title, is the existence in our brains of two independent sytems for organizing knowledge. Kahneman calls them System One and System Two. System One is amazingly fast, allowing us to recognize faces and understand speech in a fraction of a second. It must have evolved from the ancient little brains that allowed our agile mammalian ancestors to survive in a world of big reptilian predators. Survival in the jungle requires a brain that makes quick decisions based on limited information. Intuition is the name we give to judgments based on the quick action of System One. It makes judgments and takes action without waiting for our conscious awareness to catch up with it. The most remarkable fact about System One is that it has immediate access to a vast store of memories that it uses as a basis for judgment. The memories that are most accessible are those associated with strong emotions, with fear and pain and hatred. The resulting judgments are often wrong, but in the world of the jungle it is safer to be wrong and quick than to be right and slow.
System Two is the slow process of forming judgments based on conscious thinking and critical examination of evidence. It appraises the actions of System One. It gives us a chance to correct mistakes and revise opinions. It probably evolved more recently than System One, after our primate ancestors became arboreal and had the leisure to think things over. An ape in a tree is not so much concerned with predators as with the acquisition and defense of territory. System Two enables a family group to make plans and coordinate activities. After we became human, System Two enabled us to create art and culture.
His "System One" is more prone to illusions, but it takes less mental effort, as does getting through Dyson's intelligent article.
One must be very careful and calculating about taking on debt, whether for school or anything else. I have seen many lives crushed by unnecessary debt.
Readers may not have heard much about Heritage Turkeys. There have been many breeds of farm turkeys over the years, but today the bland Broad-Breasted White breed is the mass market turkey.
Heritage Turkeys are genetically closer to their wild ancestors, have far more flavor, and run to smaller sizes. Their meat is redder than that of the Broad Breasted White. They are growing in popularity because they do not taste like cardboard. In fact, their flavor is similar to Wild Turkey.
It's like the difference between a supermarket tomato and a home-grown variety.
You can buy Heritage Turkeys online at Dean & DeLuca or D'Artagnan. Some Whole Foods have them, but I won't go to Whole Foods, due to a Whole Foods allergy.
Wow. I just found out that D'Artagnan even sells Free-Range Wild Turkeys. Man, that saves a lot of otherwise-wasted time sitting in the woods.
These birds cost a little more, but they are hardly the same animal as the supermarket Broad-Breasted White. They taste like a game bird.
"Capitalism" isn't a theory. It's just what people do when they are left alone to do what comes naturally - like sex. Rush was hilarious on the topic yesterday, pointing out to the Prez that capitalist enterprise made his suits, his million-dollar buses, his bulletproof limos, his Blackberry, his airplanes, his vacation houses, his Wall St campaign funds, etc etc.
So Europe’s 60 or 70 year history with socialism is about to end in violent upheavals and misery… and here’s this ignoramus saying that it’s capitalism which is the proven failure.
Free markets have booms and busts. Socialism only has chronic busts.
Steve Diamond made an interesting post last week describing the longstanding tension between the brain/behavioral and the mind/psychodynamic camps in psychology as a civil war. I have written here a number of times about this conflict, one that is at the heart of what is happening in psychiatry as well (if you are interested in the state of affairs in mental health, you really should read 1BoringOldMan who does a superb job of taking apart the trail of studies and inflated promises that got us here). I wish that what we are in were a civil war because then at least there would be active debate and engagement on these issues, but the takeover of psychology by the cognitive behavioral/brain folks is near complete on the academic level so that many younger clinicians have no idea of what is/was missing in their training. My side, the psychodynamic/mind side finds voice mostly through blogs like this one and those of other likeminded psychologists, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists. But together our voices are far less audible than those of the pharmaceutical and insurance companies and those of mental health professionals whose careers have been built on the effort to topple us. And the average person seeking help has no idea that these issues even exist. Yeah, it makes me kind of pessimistic at times.
I often feel that same way. Much of Psychiatric writing today has become so "medicalized," or "pseudo-medicalized," that you get the sense that it is check lists being treated rather than real people. Indeed, the two views of the patient - the hurting person - have developed different languages such that they cannot communicate well, and the alienation has become so extreme that I have heard them accuse eachother of malpractice.
Some of us attempt to straddle the divide, but it is difficult to rapidly alternate world-views.
While my cousins received free cradle-to-grave government handouts, they paid a devastating price for their dependency. They lost themselves -- their self-esteem, pride, and dignity. They lost the joy of success after failure. They lost the pursuit of their dreams. They lost the experience of developing their God-given gifts and talents. For perceived security, my cousins willingly remained slaves on the Democrats' government plantation.
"If a mad scientist were to repair to his laboratory to design a machine that would make white liberals uncomfortable, that machine would be Thomas Sowell":
Now 81 years old, Sowell is known as a libertarian-leaning conservative, which he is, and he has a thriving sideline in debunking racial platitudes. But he is first an economist, which means he is first an observer and reporter of facts, and if those facts take him to uncomfortable places, so be it. No, the prevalence of black men in the NBA doesn’t mean that the NBA is racist, it means that reality is racist. Yes, Barack Obama and congressional Democrats really do practice the same kind of ethnic politics that resulted in the Rwandan genocide and the Sri Lankan civil war, even if they do not practice them to the same extent. Yes, affirmative action is naked racism. No, rent-control laws don’t control rent. No, gun-control laws don’t control guns. No, standardized exams are not culturally biased—but, yes, life is culturally biased.
Because he is black, his opinions about race are controversial. If he were white, they probably would be unpublishable
The below is copied from Home Of Heroes. I hadn't heard this story before. On this day, 70-years after Pearl Harbor, take some time to navigate around the site, and find many stories you may not have heard before. And remember. And resolve for our future that lays in the hands of our Presidents to come and our servicemen and women who rise to the challenges for us all.
At 7:58 A.M. Paradise was shattered. The first of two separate waves of Japanese fighters and bombers unleashed death and destruction on the city below. Amid the bullets raking her deck, the men of the Nevada stood in formation without breaking ranks until the flag had been raised and the "Star Spangled Banner" finished its refrain. Then they begin what ultimately became a two hour struggle for survival. They watched in horror as the first bombs hit their sister ship the U.S.S. Arizona. A few minutes after 8 A.M. the Arizona sank beneath the surface of the harbor taking 1,103 men of its 1,400 crew to a watery grave.
Caught completely unawares, the devastation was unbelievable. By 10 o'clock 7 of the Navy's heavy battleships had either sunk or were severely damaged. Of 394 airplanes on the island, 140 were destroyed and 80 more damaged. The island lay in smoky ruins, 2,330 Americans killed, 1,145 wounded. Smoke from the Arizona filled the morning sky bearing mute testimony to the total destruction wrought by the enemy. But through the pall of smoke one image remained, the flag of the United States of America. It was the one symbol of hope, a reminder that freedom had survived and would ultimately triumph. When it seemed that all hope had vanished with the last whisps of smoke from the Arizona, the Red, White, and Blue still waved over Hawaii.
The first keyboard I ever approached was an 1800s Mason & Hamlin single manual
A Ballad of Gentleness
Why Is Art 
Readers may not have heard much about Heritage Turkeys. There have been many breeds of farm turkeys over the years, but today the bland Broad-Breasted White breed is the mass market turkey.
Mead to college students: 
This Man Came Up With 