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.
Evil exists, does terrible damage in this world and in this life, but is conquered, overcome, in the final end.
The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir. h/t Dr. Bob, who is mostly on blog sabbatical. I am not too big on praise songs, but this one will not harm you too much.
... it is more than slightly ironic that Democrats, the fiercely pro-choice party, reserve free choice for aborting a fetus while denying it for such matters as choosing your child’s school or joining a union.
Well, I have never heard of a "national curriculum." The very idea of that creeps me out. Parents and local schools ought to be entirely competent to figure out what sorts of readings are good for primary school. It's not rocket science.
My larger point, however, is that parents can and should guide their kids' reading. If you turn off or throw out the TV, get rid of computer games, most kids with any intelligence or curiosity will read anything at hand. Even "informational texts." Sometimes people talk as if "curricula" is where learning begins and ends. Thank God, it is not.
This might be of interest if you're into uploading or downloading large files. In my case, I don't have a TV so I download my few weekly shows from Usenet a few days afterward. They're high-res and usually about a gig in size. Likewise, when I upload a 1-hour documentary to one of my web sites, they're also often a gig in size. Since I'm using a slow Verizon Wireless connection, this can take some serious time, like three or four hours.
And during that time, because I'm doing other things on the computer, I might suddenly need to reboot. Hence the problem.
Below the fold I'll reveal what I know about continuing stopped uploads and downloads. I recently made a fascinating discovery about Firefox that I wanted to pass along. Unlike Internet Exploder, it can actually continue broken downloads, but, naturally, there's a trick to it.
Of course, current colleges (at current rates!) are not necessarily delivering much bang for the buck either: According to Richard Arum and Josipha Roksa, authors of the 2011 book Academically Adrift, 36 percent of college students fail to “show any significant improvement over four years” as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment.
In my view, expressed frequently here, the higher ed bubble is a result of the democratization of the higher ed industry. Colleges, designed for scholars, compete for "customers," standards drop, and prices rise to whatever level the market, subsidies, and student loans can bear. A degree is a mass market product, which means that the customer must be kept happy. That represents a complete reversal of historical approaches.
I spoke with a recent state college grad who told me that he never read a book in four years. He told me he mainly got by on what he had learned in high school. I think many people are not aware of how low expectations have dropped outside of the elite schools and non-elite STEM programs.
There must be thousands of profs out there who are teaching well-below their levels of competence due to the requirement to dumb down their efforts.
Underlying all of these issues is a simple fact: learning is not something that can be "delivered," something you "get" or can buy. The life of the mind cannot be bought. It can be ignited, but not bought. A degree can be bought today, but its economic value today as a mass-market product, and its price, are out of sync.
From my doc and from my reading, I think it is fairly well-established that total cholesterol levels have little directly to do with cardiovascular disease, but perhaps LDLs do (LDL bad, HDL good, supposedly, and all more heavily genetically-determined than dietarily).
Dietary LDL may or may not have a meaningful impact on cardiovascular disease. For what it's worth, LDLs are found in poultry (even lean poultry skinned), all dairy, fish, shellfish, and red meat. Docs like to recommend salmon because it helps HDLs. Heck, it's all theoretical, but I do like salmon (with the right LDL-laden sauce, of course).
In my view, obsessing about food is neurotic, and it's Christmastime too. Who would go to a party where they served "healthy" crap? Not me. Just take your damn Lipitor, skip the carbs, hope for the best, and live it up.
Eggnog must surely be evil because it tastes good, but I do not know a doc at my club who will turn it down. We make it with Wild Turkey bourbon, fluffed eggwhites floating on the top, with tons of freshly-grated nutmeg abundantly on top of that. The recipe we use is very close to this. (That article also has a brief history of Eggnog. Rum is in fact more traditional in Eggnog than bourbon whiskey, but I prefer it with bourbon.)
Traditional New England clubs always put out a bowl of eggnog every cocktail hour between Advent and New Year's Day. We chill it with a block of ice in the middle of the punch bowl, but it can be served just as made without chilling it. My family has traditionally made it a little too strong, but without some booze who would want to drink pre-cooked scrambled eggs? Still, it's really all about the freshly-grated nutmeg.
In the (deep) South, they make Milk Punch. I've never had that.
What are our readers' favorite Eggnog concoctions? Or do you just pick up a half-gallon of the pre-made at the store?
I heard another nightmare story when it comes to domain names the other day. This was emailed to me by an old buddy:
Hey, dude -
My girlfriend was going to start up a blog site a few days ago and found out her "name.com" was already taken. It wasn't when she tested it out about a month ago. Is there somebody out there keeping track of these things and selling them to those companies that collect domain names?
As an experienced professional in the field, my experienced, professional answer was that I didn't have a clue.
But, as I've preached here in the past, why take the chance? These things are dirt cheap ($5/mo) and you don't actually have to do anything to the domain to preserve it (like build a web site), so I advocate getting it now before someone else does. You'll only have yourself to kick later on if you don't.
For hosting companies, I highly recommend BlueHost. It's owned by a good conservative family out in Provo, Utah. The CEO's twice-yearly emails are a laff riot, and very critical of current governmental policy. There's no sign-up fee and no early cancellation fee. Also, the cost of the actual domain name is free, unlike some hosting companies which charge up to 35 bucks for it.
Even if you're not going to use it for twenty years until it's finally time to post pics of the grandkids, get it now. There's only one 'yourname.com' out there, and once it's gone, it's gone forever.
Speaking of grandkids, below the fold I'll elaborate on the private 'family blog', and what a blast they are. I have two great stories to tell.
This is, if you call my causing an 84-year-old man to openly weep, 'great'.
Labor needs representation and many of the values that drew millions of working Americans into the labor movement endure. But few American institutions are as ill suited to the 21st century or have proved so inept at reorganization and reform as the unions.
President Obama's tenure as president will have as one of its benchmarks one of the worst and longest-running unemployment records in recent history -- and he will own it all by himself.
Edward Prescott has shown that the U.S. average marginal effective tax rate is around 40%. This means that if the average worker earns $100 from additional output, he will be able to consume only an additional $60.
"Ted Dalrymple" (Dr. Anthony Daniels) is, as readers know, a retired Brit Psychiatrist with experience in the prison system (as a physician, not as an inmate).
With or without prison experience, Psychiatrists, priests, and police officers have the experience to view people with a jaundiced eye, knowing perhaps better than most about what dark thoughts and motives lurk in the human soul because they are not in denial about the nature of human selfishness, deception and self-deception, envy, manipulativeness, sin, and evil.
In A Word to the Wise, Dalrymple questions the very premise of the idea of "man's inhumanity to man," from the Poles' treatment of their Jews to the modern British welfare state.
When Isaac Newton went to the University of Cambridge several centuries ago, he studied seven days a week, at least ten hours a day, and actively avoided the revelry that some Cambridge undergraduates engaged in even then. No one expects American undergraduates to work as hard as Isaac Newton or as medieval monks. However, what seems to be happening on many American college campuses is the development of such a powerful "fun" culture that a quarter of the students or more arrive thinking that having fun is the main reason they are at college and that the pursuit of knowledge should be resorted to only when they have nothing better to do.
There was a time when the upper classes approached college casually, more as a rite of passage than anything else because they were confident about their futures, while the aspiring classes put their noses to the grindstone the way Newton did. That was in a time, however, when probably 1% or less of the population even considered higher education. It has been democratized, which might be another way of saying that many colleges are now glorified high schools.
My son Jason, 12, is volunteering at a local senior citizens facility. A project called COME ALIVE through music revives residents in its acute care and Alzheimer wings to make contact with themselves through the music they loved in their younger years. Residents who are otherwise inert and non-communicative are sparked to move and verbalize their memories and feelings. If you think this isn't possible, please watch the entire video below.
Jason's project is to rip 20s and 30s Swing and Big Band, 40s-50s Show Music, and even some of the best 60s rock (there are some disabled younger residents) music and songs from CDs onto individualized mixes that can be played for the residents on their iPods and earphones. College students who are majoring in therapy track the results and tweak the mixes. The benefit to the residents is astounding and heart warming.
For legal copyright reasons, the music can't be simply ripped from Youtube. It must come from CDs.
Many of you have CDs at home that you no linger listen to of these types of music. PLEASE donate the CDs to this project. Just Comment below and I will directly email you, or email me directly at BNKSD1@aol.com and I will quickly get back to you with the address to mail the CDs.
A BIG Thank you in advance.
P.S.: The Post Office has good rates for mailing packages using their boxes.
Rugg proposed “new materials of instruction” that “shall illustrate fearlessly and dramatically the inevitable consequence of the lack of planning and of central control over the production and distribution of physical things. . . . We shall disseminate a new conception of government—one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interest of all people; and one that will successfully adjust the psychological problems among men.”
A simple jump rope is possibly the best cardio exercise device one can own. It is also the cheapest and most portable.
Jumping rope will burn also 11 calories per minute (more than anything else) while offering almost total body fitness. If you have the fitness and endurance to jump rope for half an hour, you can burn off one candy bar or one donut but few people could go that long even if they wanted to. At a very fast pace, maybe a donut in less than half an hour. However, nobody I've seen can go that long.
At my gym, it's mainly men who jump. Amazon has all sorts of jump ropes. Many people like the beaded ones and the weighted ones.
Done properly on the toes, it's a low-impact exercise. Most people seem to jump in 30-second to three- or six- minute stints. It is demanding for people over 25.
This will only be of interest to those of you using high-CPU programs. I just made a very clever discovery that tied up the one loose end and figured it deserved a post.
This deals with taking a program that uses high CPU and lowering its 'priority' so it won't drag the system down, but will still hustle along as fast as it can otherwise. I suppose this is mainly for the field of video, because traditionally video conversion programs are power-hungry and slow, but it would relate to any CPU-hungry situation.
We'll be dealing with batch files, DOS, strings and variables.
A friend from Chicago, involved in Illinois politics who has known Obama since his early days in the Illinois State Senate, told me that two things that trump everything else in Obama’s mind: redistributing the wealth and empowering labor unions. Look at everything the President does, my friend says, and you will find one or the other lurking in the background.
When Israel announced that planning would begin for some housing in an area known as E1, the New York Times led the media howling that building there would cut off the northern from the southern parts of a future Palestine in the areas of the West Bank. Despite the Palestinians publicly announcing at the UN their breaking the Oslo Accords, a reason had to be found or created to hold Israel to blame for obstructing peace!
This map (courtesy of Honest Reporting), for example, shows that not to be true.
The New York Times must have bought a map, and just ran two corrections to its prior reporting, if it can be dignified as such. Blind ignorance is blamed on an “editing error.” Yeah, and Delaware is our largest state.
That area has never been offered to Palestinians in any of the many proposals for 98% of the West Bank to be theirs for a state. See this map:
In the course of our basement water pipe flood this summer, I seem to have lost my couple of pairs of light shooting gloves. I like to shoot with gloves even when it isn't too cold. Most of the hunting I do tends to be in cold weather so I like to get used to the feel of gloves on a trigger.
And I have a very mild but uncomfortable case of Raynaud's.
Glovemakers vary in what they mean by L,M, S, etc. Here's a great way to determine your numerical glove size when ordering online. Leather, of course, tends to stretch a bit with use. (That image in the link might need to be reduced before printing)
The right gloves for hunting grouse in the snow or ducks in the sleet at 10 degrees F is another topic. The perfect gloves for those things do not exist, as best I have been able to determine. Heavy waterproof gloves, obviously, do not fit rapidly and easily inside a trigger guard, and if you are using a double-triggered old s/s, it's really a problem.
Ideas are welcome. I wonder what the Army uses in Afghanistan in the winter. Maybe things like this.
Her post reads a bit like an old fogey complaining about "these kids today," but she is talking about adult-aged kids, not real teenagers. Some of the comments are interesting. I am convinced that difficult realities and challenges are what creates adults.
I suspect that many of our readers are seeing this happening around them these days. It is a terrible time to be a graduate, whether of college or of grad school, and this seems unlikely to change any time in the next four years. There will be a glut of job-seekers such that a job - even a job without great career-building prospects - will feel more like a privilege than like an opportunity.
It's sad to see eager talent going unused. What young people in this economy need to do is to ramp up their job-seeking skills to a level of intensity rarely required in the past 40 years, or to make something interesting happen themselves, on their own initiative. Necessity is the mother of invention.
Compared to these youngsters, I feel like I had it easy. And I didn't because I went eight years going from place to place with little kids, never with a real or even semi-permanent home, trying to find my right niche, never making much money at all. Constructing the life or career one dreams of is never easy and often impossible, but it's far more difficult now.
This might be of interest if you're into uploading or downloading large files. In my case, I don't have a TV so I download my few weekly shows from 
This "Lost Generation" 
From my doc and from my reading, I think it is fairly well-established that total cholesterol levels have little directly to do with cardiovascular disease, but perhaps 
Peaceable Kingdom: Cart pulled by lion, two sheep, and a bear. More cart pics 
Your job rut 
A simple jump rope is possibly the best cardio exercise device one can own. It is also the cheapest and most portable.
This will only be of interest to those of you using high-CPU programs. I just made a very clever discovery that tied up the one loose end and figured it deserved a post.
In the course of our basement water pipe flood this summer, I seem to have lost my couple of pairs of light shooting gloves. I like to shoot with gloves even when it isn't too cold. Most of the hunting I do tends to be in cold weather so I like to get used to the feel of gloves on a trigger.