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.
Ever gnaw on a raw Rhubarb stem? I used to love that, when I was a kid. Especially the tender thin stems. Huge flavor, tangy, bitter, spicey.
While "researching" this post, I learned that it's commonly done in Turkey and Iraq. Our garden rhubarb came from China. The leaves are poisonous. There are lots of types of rhubarbs, most inedible.
Rhubarb is the most reliable edible perennial that you can have in your northern garden. Just throw some manure on them every Spring, and you're done. The only problem I have had with them (my last patch) was that the plants kept going to flower and seed without producing new stems. I guess I should have cut off the flowering stems sooner.
Treating college as the new high school hasn’t benefited students who waste four years of their lives and pick up staggering debts which make it harder for them to buy homes and start families, but it has benefited the liberal arts infrastructure, which, despite the liberal spin, is just as good at handing out useless degrees with no career path as any for-profit college. And it has benefited the Democratic Party, which rightly sees college campuses as recruitment grounds and liberal-voter-training seminars. ...
Factory fishing, aided by helos, has crushed the population of Bunker. An excellent and thorough review of the politics of the plankton-eating Menhaden which, like the Herring, is the preeminent fish of the lower end of the Atlantic food chain:
A Fish Story - How an angler and two government bureaucrats may have saved the Atlantic Ocean.
Roger Kimball is one of too few conservative writers who can lend deep erudition to connect the central tenets of Western civilization with today’s immediate events and concerns. Kimball’s influence is not only through his own writings but his featuring of that of others at his The New Criterion and its blog Arma Virumque (I’ve been overhonored to appear at the blog) and his publishing house Encounter Books.
Now, you have the chance to get in depth with Kimball’s learning and lessons in his new book The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia. Order at this link.
Why does relativism, which begins with a beckoning promise of liberation from “oppressive” moral constraints, so often end in the embrace of immoral constraints that are politically obnoxious? Part of the answer lies in the hypertrophy or perversion of relativism’s conceptual enablers— terms like “pluralism,” “diversity,” “tolerance,” “openness,” and the like. They all name classic liberal virtues, but it turns out that their beneficence depends on their place in a constellation of fixed values. Absent that hierarchy, they rapidly degenerate into epithets in the armory of political suasion. They retain the aura, the emotional charge, of positive values. But in reality they act as moral solvents, as what Gairdner calls “value-dispersing terms that serve as an official warning to accept all behaviours of others without judgment and, most important, to keep all moral opinions private.” In this sense, the rise of relativism encourages an ideology of non-judgmentalism only as a prelude to ever more strident discriminations.
And…
[T]he fruits of egalitarianism are ignorance, the habit of intellectual conformity, and the systematic subjection of cultural achievement to political criteria. In the university, this means classes devoted to pop novels, rock videos, and third-rate works chosen simply because their authors are members of the requisite sex, ethnic group, or social minority. It involves an attack on permanent things for the sake of the trendy and ephemeral. It means students who are graduated not having read Milton or Dante or Shakespeare—or, what is in some ways even worse, who have been taught to regard the works of such authors chiefly as hunting grounds for examples of patriarchy, homophobia, imperialism, or some other politically correct vice. It means faculty and students who regard education as an exercise in disillusionment and who look to the past only to corroborate their sense of superiority and self-satisfaction.
A therapy patient of mine recently sat thoughtfully for a few minutes, then exclaimed "Oh my God, I've been acting as if I really had power over all these things, as if I had the power to prevent bad things from happening."
"Yes you have," I said. "That's your good insight for the day."
"I've been doing this all my life. Am I crazy?"
"Not at all," I said. "You just discovered one of your underlying assumptions about things. We call them 'unconscious fantasies' - or we call them that until you become aware of them."
One of the rewards of my work is helping people discern their hitherto unattended-to, unexamined, "unconscious" operating principles. When these are held up to the light, it can be disorienting, humbling, and distressing for many to realize that much of their problematic or ineffective behavior has been determined by following a false map, as it were. To mix metaphors even further, to realize that they were standing on unsolid ground.
My very pleasant businesswoman patient came to the realization that one of her dominant operating principles was to keep everybody in her world, everyone she knew, safe from distress, worry, discomfort, disease, and misfortune. Not only did this principle run her ragged, but it often failed. When it failed, she blamed herself for not having done enough. The unconscious fantasy she uncovered might be called a "fantasy of omnipotence."
Everybody operates, to varying degrees, according to unconscious fantasies about themselves, others, and the world in general. Nobody is 100% in reality. Problems can arise depending on how far the hidden assumptions diverge from reality. Reality is the harshest teacher, and never spares the rod.
What are these things made of? Freud discovered/defined them, although writers and students of human nature have always been interested in the irrational consistencies of personality. Freud said that they are constructed from wishes, fears, hopes, dreams, experiences, temperaments, and especially defenses. I think that is true. During maturation, they become organized like pieces of mental software. Like the beating heart and the digesting bowel, they are part of what and who we are while operating outside our awareness.
Unfortunately, we cannot ask people what their deep operative fantasies are, because they are, by definition, unaware of them. That's where Psychoanalytic skills come in, like soul-surgeons, to try to biopsy and, perhaps, extract the problem software. However, our medical rule is primum non nocere so we try not to let the best become the enemy of the good-enough.
Fortunately, the human mind seems to have a relatively limited repertoire of unconscious fantasies, so we experts are expected to be able to identify them, in time. That's a topic for another post, maybe.
Taco USA - How Mexican food became more American than apple pie.
I do like Mexican, on occasion. I like the real stuff, and have a little joint down the road a piece where we can get it cheap. It's near Home Depot, so that's good. They don't speak English, but that's ok with me. They understand "hot."
"People in the education and political establishments pretend they're not motivated by such "callous" motives as greed and profits. These people "care" about us, but from which areas of our lives do we derive the greatest pleasures and have the fewest complaints, and from which areas do we have the greatest headaches and complaints? We tend to have a high satisfaction level with goods and services like computers, cell phones, movies, clothing and supermarkets. These are areas where the motivations are greed and profits. Our greatest dissatisfaction is in areas of caring and no profit motive such as public education, postal services and politics. Give me greed and profits, and you can keep the caring."
...the next time you hear a good story about why the financial recession, or any other economically significant event, was caused by a single collection of bad actors — or how a simple linear narrative “explains” an important event — remember this: Just as we are wired to like a diet rich in fats and sugars, we have an appetite for simple, coherent narratives. Neither habit is good for our long-term health.
June 18th will be the 200th anniversary of the US declaration of war with Britain.
It was an interesting war, including the Star Spangled Banner and the burning of the White House. And, of course, the Battle of New Orleans with Andrew "Old Hickory" Jackson - fought after the peace treaty had been signed.
Central government -- the Central State -- has been in the expansion mode for so long that the process of contracting government is completely alien to the nation, to those who work for the State, and to those who are dependent on the State. Thus we have little recent historical experience of Peak Government and few if any conceptual guideposts to help us understand this contraction.
Peak Government is not a reflection of government services or the millions of individuals who work in government; it is a reflection of four key systemic forces that drove State expansion are now either declining or reversing...
Gaura lindheimeri is a new plant for me. This one is nicknamed "Whirling Butterflies."
These are perennials (depending on winter temperatures), hybrids of a North American wildflower. Drought tolerant, prefers full sun, blooms all summer. Perfect border plant. They come in white or pink.
The only thing in life more charming than a well-structured and well-designed perennial border is a well-structured, well-designed girl.
Businesses lose money every day by making calculated risks. I don't know what the big deal is. All business operates on risks. You win some, lose some. You try to win more than you lose.
Ever gnaw on a raw Rhubarb stem? I used to love that, when I was a kid. Especially the tender thin stems. Huge flavor, tangy, bitter, spicey.
Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
Image via
A therapy patient of mine recently sat thoughtfully for a few minutes, then exclaimed "Oh my God, I've been acting as if I really had power over all these things, as if I had the power to prevent bad things from happening." 
Taco USA
Teaching Doctors the ‘End of Life Conversation’