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.
A woman and a baby were in the doctor's examining room, waiting for the doctor to come in for the baby's first exam. The doctor arrived, and examined the baby, checked his weight, and being a little concerned, asked if the baby was breast-fed or bottle-fed.
'Breast-fed, ' she replied..
'Well, strip down to your waist,' the doctor ordered.
She did. He pinched her nipples, pressed, kneaded, and rubbed both breasts for a while in a very professional and detailed examination.
Motioning to her to get dressed, the doctor said, ' No wonder this baby is underweight. You don't have any milk. '
‘I know,' she said, 'I'm his Grandma, But I'm glad I came.’
The story of Newark, New Jersey is a classic of the Northeast's Blue City woes with corrupt, plunder-oriented politicians, corrupt and greedy unions, the Mafia, unskilled blacks from the South coming for industrial opportunities which disappeared, drugs and drug gangs, welfare, white flight - all of it.
You can see the same sad story in Bridgeport, CT, Camden, NJ, or Hartford, CT. Newark Mayor Cory Booker has sought the chance to turn things around.
Is Booker a Don Quixote or a Rudy Giuliani? Time will tell.
They should be protesting the federal debt they are facing, instead of the debt they freely took upon themselves in an effort to improve their prospects in life. Apparently higher education does not instill emotional maturity.
I am asked to do a brief post about Disability and have been sent a couple of links. "Disability," as in our Social Security Disability welfare program, is one about which I have unpleasant feelings which some might view as cruel. I prefer to view it as Tough Love.
However, it comes from experience. The fact is that I will not consult with anybody on Disability, nor will I participate in anybody's Disability application unless they are in a coma, severely brain-damaged, or the like. Can people with (treated) schizophrenia work, be useful, and maintain some dignity? Of course they can. Every patient of mine with schizophrenia works, except for one housewife.
Here are my reasons for that, from a psychiatric standpoint:
1. Nobody with a treated mental problem is incapable of doing something useful 2. Helping a patient obtain Disability is a way of saying that you have given up on their future 3. Many people on Disability give up on making a life, and just mope around for years 4. I see people with severe disabilities working all sorts of jobs, maintaining their pride and independence 5. The scam component is huge, I believe: free money. I've seen it plenty of times. I even get spam emails weekly inviting me to fill out a form for Disability lawyers: "Find out if you're entitled." Also, lots of people with Disability seem to work off the books.
Few people have any idea of how easy it is to get on Disability these days. Here is one of the links: Workers Comp. and Unemployment
On June 1, 2001, a Palestinian terrorist killed 21 young people, and wounded 132 others, in a discotheque in Tel Aviv. The terrorist was heralded by Hamas and Islamic Jihad as one of their own, and his family rewarded by the Palestinian Authority. Shortly after the attack, the graffiti appeared near the discotheque, “They won’t stop us from dancing.”
Thursday, April 26, is the 64th birthday of Israel, still dancing. Indeed, if there were a “Dancing With The Stars” competition for countries, Israel would win for its remarkable, seemingly miraculous successes in all fields of endeavor against all odds during its creation and 64 years, combined with the spirit that keeps striving for improvement and for peace with intractable enemies.
There’s a new journalism prize, The Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Mendacity. PJ Media and The New Criterion will award the Prize annually “for what our readers consider the most egregious example of dishonest reporting for the fiscal year.” The initial judges include Peter Collier, Roger Kimball, Cliff May, Ron Radosh, Glenn Reynolds, Claudia Rosett, and Roger L. Simon. Roger Simon writes, “Since this is a new prize the committee also solicits your suggestions on how we should carry on our work and any other suggestions regarding the Walter Duranty Prize.”
There’s certainly enough expertise on the panel to reach such a choice. I suggest the following criteria:
1.In parallel to the reportage by Walter Duranty, the prize for dishonest reporting should be reporting on a foreign country. Walter Duranty’s infamous whitewashing of the starvation and death of millions of Ukrainians in 1932-3 will be hard to exceed, but there are enough terrible instances of widespread state brutality today that journalists who espouse the state line or distort the facts should be the priority.
2.In parallel to the reportage by Walter Duranty, the prize for dishonest reporting should be to a bureau chief for a major news agency, newspaper, or other prominent media, as Walter Duranty was the longtime bureau chief in Moscow for the New York Times. This ties the responsibility directly to the owners of the venue.
3.In parallel to the reportage by Walter Duranty, the prize for dishonest reporting should be the recipient of an award for journalism, as Walter Duranty was of the Pulitzer Prize for his. This ties the responsibility to the journalism profession.
Susan Squire, the author of a forthcoming history of marriage called I Don’t, told me that marriage wasn’t made to handle all the sexual pressure we’re putting on it. For one thing, the average life span is far greater than it was 100 years ago; what is marriage to do with all that time? And in days gone by, marriage was a more formal institution whose purposes were breeding and family. Squire says that cultural standards of morality have changed dramatically. In ancient aristocracies, rich men had courtesans for pleasure and concubines for quick sex. In the Victorian age, prostitution was far more open than it is today. America is a special case. By the early-twentieth century, she says, the combined impact of egalitarian ideals and the movies had burdened American marriage with a new responsibility: providing romantic love forever. Squire says that the first couples therapy began cropping up in the thirties, when people found their marriages weren’t measuring up to cultural expectations.
With mashed potato minds fresh from the psychological Cuisinart of public schools, the next generation in line to inherit the most fantastically schizophrenic nation in history will be like candy for social engineers; utterly unequipped for the mission.
Well, the answer seems obvious to me. Liberal Fascism. The authoritarian, or totalitarian, streak in the Left has always been there, and always will be.
From Prof. Johnson's piece:
What will it take for wider outrage to emerge? We've already had a case of an innocent student (Caleb Warner) expelled from school under the preponderance-of-evidence standard, as the AP article mentioned. But to my knowledge no congressional Democrats or liberal columnists commented on the Warner case. And so, I suppose, we'll continue to wait, and be told that issues of campus due process and civil liberties haven't popped up in recent years.
NY Times Public Editor: The Times' Coverage of Obama Has Been More Favorable Than Any Recent President; It's Time For A Skeptical Look At Obama and His Record
Joel Kotkin: The Great California Exodus - A leading U.S. demographer and 'Truman Democrat' talks about what is driving the middle class out of the Golden State:
... the Golden State's fastest-growing entity is government and its biggest product is red tape. The first thing that comes to many American minds when you mention California isn't Hollywood or tanned girls on a beach, but Greece. Many progressives in California take that as a compliment since Greeks are ostensibly happier. But as Mr. Kotkin notes, Californians are increasingly pursuing happiness elsewhere.
Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.
Are we allowed to make them clean their rooms? How about mowing the lawn? My kids have split wood, stacked wood, mowed fields, cleared brush, cleaned the bathroom.
Spent a couple of hours on the Connecticut coast this weekend. A vast swath of Common Slipper Shells had washed up during winter storms, a couple of feet deep. People don't eat this mollusc.
(These limpets are different from the European Common Limpet.)
They attach themselves to rocks and other hard objects. Also, to eachother. They move, extremely slowly, if they want to. I tried to figure out whether they have any predators. Supposedly some crabs can eat them, and some of those little snails can bore holes into them. I wonder whether diving ducks can pry them off their attachments, as they do with mussels.
One of the most active organizations of Jews and Christians in support of Israel is Stand With Us, who sent me this email to forward to friends. Below are facts about the misrepresentations in Sunday night's 60 Minutes program about "Christians in the Holy Land." CBS ignores the favorable conditions for Christians within Israel and ignores the persecution and oppression of Christians and other minorities throughout the Moslem countries of the Middle East. So far, CBS is also ignoring the tens of thousands of protests it has received. So, you may want to express your views to the management of CBS and 60 Minutes, to wake them to the error of their ways.
"60 MINUTES" OUTRAGE -- YOU CAN HELP
ACTION ALERT!! UNACCEPTABLE DISTORTIONS IN "60 MINUTES" EPISODE "CHRISTIANS OF THE HOLY LAND" ON APRIL 22ND
WRITE TO HEADS OF CBS AND "60 MINUTES" TO DEMAND CORRECTIONS AND EQUAL TIME
The DSM, like the Psychiatric section of the ICD-9, was developed to provide a common language to people who work in mental health. Actually, for four basic purposes: a common language, as a basis for research, as clinical guidelines, and for filling out insurance forms and disability forms.
In our daily work, many Psychiatrists do not take it too seriously but use it as a rough guideline. Unfortunately, the DSM has been over-medicalized, reified, such that everything in there is sometimes regarded as a real, discrete, "disease." Some are, some are not. In many cases, it doesn't matter, because we approach each patient as an individual human and not as a diagnostic code.
As one of my wise old mentors says, "I've never seen a patient of mine in the DSM."
Many things in life do not operate according to Game Theory, but this version of The Prisoner's Dilemma, Golden Balls, does. Lying, of course, is part of the game. This is fun:
Our pal Sipp sent us the following missive, as a corrective to this morning's link on the topic:
The recipe for barn red is right here:
-Boiled Linseed oil. (Dullards like the writer don't know there's two kinds of linseed oil. Boiled linseed oil is what's used for paints. It's deadly poison. Regular linseed oil is what Amish type people use for this and that. I had a boss in the painting business way back when that heard of all the health benefits of a tablespoon of raw linseed oil, and used to eat Boiled linseed oil until I explained the difference. Raw linseed oil never dries, properly, so you can't use it for painting a structure) -Red lead powder. This goes back to the Roman Empire. It's really cheap, and a fantastic pigment. Has a tendency to make your children into dullards, though, even moreso than TV does. -Turpentine. Just old-fashioned paint thinner, distilled from pine sap. -Japan Drier. A dash of this metallic salt makes paint films dry much faster. It's poison, too. Counter-intuitively, if you add a lot, the paint never dries.
Old-fashioned barn stain used to be called OVT. Cabot still call some of their stuff OVT, but lord knows what it is. Oil, Varnish, Turpentine.
Sugar of white lead can be substituted for red lead. It's more expensive, so red got used more. People still called primer "red lead" when I was a kid, and it came in red even after the lead was removed from it. You can still find real red lead in use in shipyards, I bet. Muffy and Biff's yacht often had a coat of it on the bottom despite their Sierra Club protestations. Barns shifted from being painted red to being painted white when the idea of a farm became synonymous with "where the milk comes from." It's just a representation of cleanliness. And colonial era barns, as well as almost everything else, were pretty much never painted in any way. If you'd have seen Salem, Mass or some such place before 1800, the whole place, every stick of it, would have been weathered brown.
The sense of entitlement, and the lack of a sense of reality in this NYT union-sponsored vid is astonishing to me.
Haven't these people ever heard of "saving money" and "investing money"? They almost sound like petulant children.
Do these people imagine that anybody gets pensions anymore, except for some government employees and some unions? Sheesh. Normal people haven't gotten pensions for decades. Mead discusses here.
I’ve never had the pleasure of having a black person as a best friend, or anything beyond a casual acquaintance. I’ve never dated a black woman, nor have I ever asked one out. I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s in an all-white suburb of Chicago. I went to an all-white Catholic boys high school and a nearly all-white private college.
I’ve never lived in a town that is more than 10% black, nor have I ever lived in a city run by blacks. I’ve never had a black next-door neighbor, nor have I lived in a neighborhood where blacks were more than a scattered presence. I have never had occasion to visit an all-black neighborhood or attend an event where a majority of the crowd is black. And I’ve never been approached by a black man while walking down a dark street at night, wondering if I should cross the street or not.
I suppose this makes me sheltered, naive, even ignorant of the way the world works and the how the racial divide colors our attitudes in our everyday lives. Frankly, I don’t care.
When you strip out all of the excessive and grandiose rhetoric, what the president is attempting to argue in these speeches is that the keys to higher economic growth in the United States are higher marginal tax rates on the successful, no reforms to entitlement programs, and more government spending on selected “investments.” To say that this is a pathetic plan for growth would be to give it too much credit.
Arab Spring 3.0 What’s more revolutionary in the Middle East: Facebook or porn?
"The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.
That's a big deal. He's the guy who thought up the Gaia Hypothesis, or religion, or whatever. Humility can arrive at any age.
Went to take a look at the Lewis Chessmen this weekend. Made of walrus tusk, found on the Isle of Lewis but most likely carved in Norway in the 1100s.
It is believed that Chess, invented in India, found its way from Moorish Spain to northern Europe where it was indeed a game for the wealthy. In Europe, the Vizier was changed to a Queen, the Warder to a Castle (rook), and an elephant to a Bishop.
Took a few pics at The Cloisters, then we took a little drive around Inwood and Washington Heights before driving down Broadway (Manhattan's original highway and first an Indian trail) through Washington Heights (in recent years mostly Central American, now very mixed), past Columbia-Presbyterian Med Center, through Harlem, then back uphill to the Columbia campus, down the Upper West Side, and then cut thru the park at 96th St to get to our lunch date on the East Side.
All I can say is that the City looked great, right through Harlem (which seemed to have plenty of Chinese people now). Not a single boarded-up shop. There are several urban hikes on my agenda, and one is from Inwood to Columbia - the 180s to 114 St. Alexander Hamilton's farmhouse was (is) in Inwood.
The Cloisters this weekend:
A few pics of the pleasant Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan below the fold -
As Jim Manzi argues in his new book “Uncontrolled,” we can’t predict what this new work world will look like. It will be invented through trial and error.
What we can be sure of is that creating your own career will produce a stronger sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. Young people who do so won’t hate their work the way those autoworkers hated those assembly line jobs.
"Obama, it would seem, wants to deny to others what he will not deny to himself. He wants to deny to the children of others what he will not deny to his own children. He wants to amass riches, but he doesn't want you to amass wealth. He doesn't mind private school for his own children, but he minds it for your children. He doesn't mind eating whatever he wants to eat, but he minds what you eat. He doesn't mind taking that 747 one frivolous trip after another, one self-serving fundraising after another, but he minds what you drive and how much fuel you use. And we can go on and on."
I’ve written before about the U.S. government’s motorcade culture. Just last month, it cost U.S. taxpayers half a million bucks to fly Obama and David Cameron to Dayton, Ohio, to pretend to enjoy a basketball game. I’ve attended previous “Summits of the Americas” and G7 meetings and other international confabs, and always heard the same story wearily retailed by representatives of the host nation — that the money-no-object Yanks are flying in a bigger and more disruptive presidential entourage than everybody else put together. At this point, the local official usually rolls his eyes, and mostly, but not always, leaves the thought unspoken:
“Americans! What do you expect?” The Queen routinely turns down requests from visiting U.S. presidents to reinforce the garden walls and replace the windows of Buckingham Palace — for an overnight stay. When the U.S. was the richest country on earth, the mad excess used to impress in a crude kind of way: If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Now it’s the Brokest Nation in History: America hasn’t got it, but still flaunts it. Which is kind of pathetic.
College students protest debt on "Trillion Dollar Day"
That pic of a Texas tan-line is going around
There’s a new journalism prize, 
More on 
Our pal 
Went to take a look at 