Saturday, January 26. 2013
What are you cooking today?
I'm doing the cooking today and not doing Mommys of America cheap 'n easy - I am making Julia Child's Boeuf Bourguignon for the kids. I browned the meat, carrots and pearl onions (doubled the amount of onions because I love them) and prepped the lardons last night. Also threw in some porcinis because I hate a meat stew without them, and a couple of dashes of ground clove. I do it the French way - large chunks of meat (2 1/2" or 3" x 3" - they shrink) and large chunks of carrot. It's meant to be about the stewed meat. I used a Chianti Classico because I had a glass last night and an open bottle, but should have used a Cab I think. Why not a Burgundy, as the name says? I don't know. I used a 3-pound chuck roast instead of venison, and cut it into large hunks. I don't know why I used the pearl onions because big old onions work just as well, or better.
Then it all goes into the big new crock pot for 7 or 8 hours, adding the pearl onions near the end. Since we old folks are going out to dinner tonight with friends, I hope the kids appreciate my efforts and will leave us some leftovers. I'll have egg noodles for it. They are the best thing for beef stews.
The only real hassle with Julia's recipe is having to drain the stew and reduce the sauce instead of just ladling it out of the pot. Worth the trouble, though.
But this is a post on lardons. Or was. While catching up on the subject of lardons, I noticed this country-style French bread: Fougasse de Foix. Baked into it is Gruyere cheese, creme fraiche, and lardons. How good does that sound?
More good info about Wolves.
There are no "mass extinctions" going on
Why We Have Guns
Being armed is a sign that we are neither slave nor serf nor willing victim
An "edgier strategy" for the obesity problem: "a carefully calibrated effort of public social pressure" to provide "a shock of recognition."
Unintended pregnancies on the rise in servicewomen
Obama: Reagan of the Left - The president sees himself as the unabashed apostle of the ever-expanding federal state.
The Worst Five Years
Aussies Strike Black Gold
Milwaukee Teachers Earn College Credits for Taking Class to Heal Their Racism
Natural rights and the Second Amendment:
Gun-rights supporters often say their right to keep and bear arms comes from the Second Amendment.
They're wrong. That right comes, as do all of our rights, from God.* The Founders and Framers presupposed and accepted as self-evident "unalienable rights, endowed by our Creator". None of the Amendments grant us any rights; what they do is forbid the government from infringing on them, as rulers have always done from the beginning of history.
In America, the government does not confer rights. The ideal of freedom, and self-reliance, preceded government. Many immigrants and descendents of more recent immigrants from lands with authoritarian histories don't understand that, nor do many African Americans whose ancestors were involuntary immigrants and even less free than indentured servants or serfs. My ancestors, however, did invent a government to ensure our freedom, and deliberately handcuffed government power for the same reason. Americans do not have delimited rights - the government has delimited powers. That was the radical idea which remains too radical for statists. Such was intended by our Constitution, anyway. Since then, government, intoxicated with its importance, has been at war with our radical Constitution.
From Eritosthenes (h/t Vanderleun):
The pattern continues: With our fever yet unbroken, we treat weakness and need as some kind of a commodity to be exchanged for products and services, and strength, capability and service to others as some kind of a blight to be tolerated only churlishly, or not tolerated at all. Strength and weakness, each one treated as the other, as the opposite of what it truly is.
Adding to our handy-dandy blogroll:
Acculturated
Real Psychiatry
There's not much of his voice on this  reconstruction of an old wax cylinder recording, but Whitman fans will relish
this voice from the past.
America
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.
Friday, January 25. 2013
Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm† - The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so. By David Mamet. A quote:
Violence by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with the strictest gun laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is only the criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been disarmed, and so crime runs riot.
Cities of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere, which leave the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed in the Constitution, typically are much safer. More legal guns equal less crime. What criminal would be foolish enough to rob a gun store? But the government alleges that the citizen does not need this or that gun, number of guns, or amount of ammunition.
It's always gratifying to see a formerly knee-jerk Lefty come around to rational sanity. None of us is required to think the way we thought twenty years ago. We are meant to learn as we go through life.
In arguments about government intervention and control, it is usual for the Leftists and statists to produce straw men with whom to debate. There is a lot of space between government intrusion and life in the jungle. Lots of space. None of us Libertarian/Conservatives want no elected government, but we do want to be left alone. We have morals and we have brains. I always thought that a function of government was to provide the basic conditions (eg protection from foreign invasions, etc) so that we can go it alone in life. Americans are not raised to be Euroweenies, but we gather plenty of resources to help us get along in life, and give us avenues in which to do good deeds, which have nothing to do with government: friends, family, neighborhoods, churches, organizations, business affiliations, etc. All the things which so impressed de Toqueville about the American spirit.
From The "acting alone" fallacy:
The private sector isn't just a bunch of people "acting alone." As Matt Welch pointed out in his critique of the speech, making and selling an object as basic as a pencil is such a complex endeavor that it takes lots of different specialists. No one person has the knowledge to accomplish that seemingly simple task; that's how decentralized knowledge is in society. And with a truly complex product, like a computer or movie, the need for people to work together is even greater still. The private sector isn't fundamentally about everyone being secluded and isolated from each other; it typically involves many people working together. Government regulation often rules out the options people would otherwise want to pursue that would let them work together more. The idea that you're "alone" unless you're being directed by the government strikes me as dehumanizing and almost abusive. So I resist this scare tactic of presenting the government as the alternative to being "alone."
I entirely agree with 1 Boring Old Man.
Here's another: DSM5 Dead on Arrival!
 We have posted in the (ancient) past about what Greek temples and sculpture looked like when they were built. Vividly-painted.
Smithsonian used chemistry to recreate Aphrodite removing her nightie.
It's a Roman copy of a Greek sculpture, but "what difference does it make"?
No doubt about it. The press has abandoned their function. Ace's We Must Do Something About The Media:
What we are witnessing is the full and seamless fusion of media power with government power.
The media used to hide it a bit, in their actions; they would temper their scorn of conservatism, throw them a bone now and again just to prove they were capable of such a thing.
No longer. The media no longer hides it in their actions. They are fully fused with the Obama Administration and DNC. The only way in which they do hide it is by simply lying when confronted about it: They'll issue a snide denial, then go about doing precisely what it is they were accused of doing.
Related to the post we linked this morning from (the Liberal Dem) Mead on one of the assumptions of modern Liberalism (ie the notion that most of the masses will never do much or reach full self-sufficiency in a modern economy), here's A nation of takers.
Naturally, we wonder to what extent that could be a self-fulfilling notion.
Somewhat related, from Dino: Innovation and technology are killing the economy?
 Hilarious climate science fail by the warmists at GRIST (and now CNN)
Muslim Group Accuses Lego Of Raaaaacism
Rotten to the Core: Obama's War on Academic Standards
Europe’s Dream Becomes Its Nightmare - The EU and a less imperialistic U.S. are not proving to be a boon for Europe.
Cameron: I don't want a country called Europe
Kansas’ Governor and G.O.P. Seek to End Income Tax
Cuomo: Governor government
Walter Williams: Experts Aren’t Deities
More Conservative Boehner Emerging as Speaker
When it comes to end of life decisions, the state does not love you
Student uses AR-15 to fend off armed home invaders
Mead: Futuristic Blues:
The concept of an elite guiding national development for the benefit of those it governs remains operative today among blue partisans, but what’s changed is that the blue elite no longer sees a bright future for the masses. It turns out that there are two ways to think about the trajectory of liberal society. The traditional view is that over time the differences between elites and non-elites can and should shrink, and it is the proper goal of liberal policy to ensure that they do.
The other view is to believe that differences of talent and ambition ensure that the world will always be divided between a creative minority and an inert majority, and that the goal of social policy isn’t to eliminate that ineradicable difference, but to ensure that the process of recruitment into the elite is genuinely fair. Once the privileges of race, gender and fortune have been neutralized so that the elite is a purely meritocratic body, the members of the elite are obliged to concern themselves for the welfare of the majority, but there is nothing more to be done about equalizing their condition with that of the elite. Authority must rest in the hands of the qualified; those who score poorly on aptitude tests, don’t do well in classes and/or lack extraordinary beauty, artistic talent or ambition must resign themselves to taking direction from the natural aristocracy that a well ordered society has brought so smoothly to the fore.
Via Drudge, the Pope tweets in nine languages
Thursday, January 24. 2013
Ed Glaeser has a fine essay up, The GOP and the City - Conservative policies have greatly benefited urbanites. Why won’t Republicans seek their votes?
I doubt that even Rudy Giuliani, to whom a generation of New Yorkers owe gratitude, could have won NYC in a national election. As Glaeser notes,
The Republicans’ abandonment of the city is good neither for their party nor for urban America. The GOP clearly needs a heftier percentage of the urban vote, but winning it by means of fiscal pandering or redistribution isn’t the way to go—partly because such a strategy would cost rural and suburban votes and partly because it would be wrong. A better approach is to offer the good ideas that cities desperately need. Republicans have plenty.
Why is that, when Republicans have demonstrated effective answers to urban issues in the cities in which they have had influence while most deep blue cities are either dying or drowning in red ink?
It's embarrassing, really.
Whenever I do a movie review, I always include a clip highlighting the main actor doing his or her thing.
What a disgrace.
It seems as though I'm bedazzled by star power, completely ignoring all the lesser actors; those who really make the movie click.
But not this time.
No, this time I'm determined to focus on the supporting cast, those who really make the movie work; those who provide the surrounding aura so that Keanu Reeves may shine.
It's only fair.
I don't believe any further review is necessary.
 By 1880, New England had been almost completely deforested. Moose, Wolf, Black Bear, and Wild Turkey were gone or limited to tiny habitat islands. Deer were rare. Then profitable farming moved west to the rich plains of Ohio and Indiana. Good-bye to rocky New England.
With reforestation, Moose and Wild Turkey have rebounded, and Beaver, Bear, and White-Tailed Deer have become pests in some areas. So have the highly-adaptable coyotes, who moved into wolf territory (coyotes were never native to the Northeast) and are now considered pests in New England with generous hunting and trapping seasons for eastern coyotes, coydogs, and coy-wolves if any.
Those critters are all Wolf food, including coyotes. Maybe not the bears.
The new coyotes of the Northeast are larger than those of Western US and Canada, may have a few wolf genes, and a large male is easily mistaken for Wolf or German Shepherd.
There is only one species of Wolf in the world - Canis lupus. The species has - or had - a global reach, with all of its various subspecies (subspecies means races - of which the domesticated Dog is one. The Grey Wolf and the Eastern Wolf are probably the same subspecies, but there is much controversy about wolf subspecies genetics).
All domestic dogs in the world were genetically engineered from the Eurasian Grey Wolf subspecies, including African domestic dogs, beginning around 14,000 years ago. Wolves - dogs - were domesticated before any other animal but your average wild wolf cannot be civilized, even if raised from birth by man. Humans must have found the rare wolf individuals with civilizable genetic flaws as in photo below:
North America's Grey Wolf was an immigrant across the Bering Strait from Siberia and, along with the Cougar, were the dominant predators across the entire US and subarctic Canada.
Dominant predators require large ranges of undeveloped land, preferably without roads and cars. The Cougars will have a tough time repopulating the Northeast, but the Wolves can come down from Quebec. In dribs and drabs, they have been doing so. Probably lone wolves. Visual reports are not reliable, but DNA testing is so the animal has to be shot or trapped to be tested to distinguish the animal from a coydog, a coy-wolf, etc. I don't know why coyotes and wolves can interbreed if they are separate species.
There are no records of confirmed Wolf breeding or pack-forming yet in New England, but these occurences would not be surprising, and would be welcome to many. Wolves remain common enough in Canada to have popular hunting seasons for them. Wolves leave people alone, unlike foolish Cougars who sometimes confuse a jogger with a deer and eat them up.
Here's one report from the Adirondacks
About wolves in Maine
Some reports re wolves in New England
 About the Taurus Judge. That's what Marianne had. It will shoot a .410 cartridge.
Mayor Bloomberg never goes anywhere without his firearms
If the GOP wants to regain political power it will also have to find a middle ground on abortion. The demographics insist.
Where did European Jews come from?
U.S. Union Membership, Both Rate and Number, Continues Dropping
Liberal Blogger: ‘How Dare You Smear Hillary by Quoting Her Accurately!’
'What Difference Does It Make?' Mrs. Clinton finds herself in a familiar, if ironic, role.
Indoctrination about "white privilege" probably won't make kids into little liberals.
Hinderaker: Is Liberalism Doomed?
Top Obama Aide: U.S. System Not Worthy of Obama
The High Cost of Obama’s America
If They Were Baby Seals Instead of Just Babies...
NBC Panel Scolds Prince Harry: 'Why Do You Need to Antagonize the Taliban?
Heather on women in combat: "I am not aware of any comparable crusade to create gender-integrated football teams. At least America knows what’s really important."
Cameron promises Britain more freedom from European Union
Surprise! Mafia Heavily Involved With “Green” Energy
Wednesday, January 23. 2013
Cabin Fever Brown Ale from New Holland Brewery. It's cold outside.
The government now is on track to control medical care. What next? Michael Lind has just two items on his wish list: Voting rights for felons, and universal government child care.
However, we know that Leviathan's hunger for money and control is never sated. If you imagine that there is ever "enough," just ask a Leftist where the endpoint should be, the point at which government's task is complete.
There will always be a list, the job will never be done, and, still, utopia will never arrive because dystopia always arrives first.
Related: Gerard found that One Cosmos has reviewed Our Logophobic President, with his sarcasm button turned on. One sample:
"A great nation must protect its people from life's worst hazards and misfortune."
Hmm. Does that include protection from the most devastating hazard and misfortune of them all, the tyrannical and intrusive state?
Because if the 20th century taught us one lesson, it is that there is nothing more destructive than the all-wise and all-powerful state predicated on the fantasy that it will protect its citizens from all of life's unavoidable exigencies. I mean, just protect me from domestic and foreign enemies, okay? And stop violating with the Constitution. Then we'll talk.
What are life's worst hazards, anyway? Probably the same they've always been: war. Famine. Disease. Poverty. So, why don't we cure hunger by imitating the Soviet Union and putting the state in charge of food production and distribution? While we're at it, why doesn't the federal government create millions of pretend jobs and lavish its worthless employees with absurdly generous wages and benefits?
Oh, right. I guess Obama noticed how effectively that model is working here in California
Females today are "overrepresented" on almost every educational metric.
I propose affirmative action for boys to compensate for adverse impact.
 Prof. of Philosophy and Law (NYU) Thomas Nagel's classic short essay What Is It Like To Be a Bat? (1974) is a fairly deep reflection on mind and consciousness. Take an extra Adderal before studying it. One key quote:
At the present time the status of physicalism is similar to that which the hypothesis that matter is energy would have had if uttered by a pre-Socratic philosopher. We do not have the beginnings of a conception of how it might be true. In order to understand the hypothesis that a mental event is a physical event, we require more than an understanding of the word 'is'. The idea of how a mental and a physical term might refer to the same thing is lacking, and the usual analogies with theoretical identification in other fields fail to supply it. They fail because if we construe the reference of mental terms to physical events on the usual model, we either get a reappearance of separate subjective events as the effects through which mental reference to physical events is secured, or else we get a false account of how mental terms refer (for example, a causal behaviorist one).
He is certainly one of the most provocative and interesting philosophers around today.
Prof. Nagel has a new book out: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False . One graf from the review by Orr at NYRB:
In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel continues his attacks on reductionism. Though the book is brief its claims are big. Nagel insists that the mind-body problem “is not just a local problem” but “invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.” If what he calls “materialist naturalism” or just “materialism” can’t explain consciousness, then it can’t fully account for life since consciousness is a feature of life. And if it can’t explain life, then it can’t fully account for the chemical and physical universe since life is a feature of that universe. Subjective experience is not, to Nagel, some detail that materialist science can hand-wave away. It’s a deal breaker. Nagel believes that any future science that grapples seriously with the mind-body problem will be one that is radically reconceived.
Epistomology becomes a whirl, or a whirlpool. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." I'll put Nagel's new book on my 2013 reading list, which continously expands. Too many books, too little time.
Despite what Obama claims, we are headed directly towards that European model of slackers: Not a 'nation of takers,' Mr. President? Check the numbers.
We are so far from JFK's "Ask not what your country can do for you..."
Tyler Durden: The Socialism Of Europe Has Arrived At Our Shores...
Bring on the cold weather
Sarkozy's plans to dodge new 75% French tax rate by moving to London
Connecticut: Bridgeport Versus Greenwich
Only the rich can afford to work?
Is there progress in art?
Of course not. Just changes in fashion.
The Lost Wolves of New England
We want them back. They would kill the dang coyotes, and our overpopulation of Moose, White Tail Deer, and raccoons.
Charter schools, like private schools, avoid hiring staff with teaching credentials
"Just hours before he died in a terrorist attack at the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Ambassador Chris Stevens sent a cable to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton..."
It's a problem
Good stuff at Thompson
Inaugural: not a word about jobs or the economy
If everybody is on the dole, who will pay the bills?
Health Insurance Brokers Prepare Clients For Obamacare Sticker Shock
5.0 Liberalism and the Future of the State
"after the Sandy Hook murders I felt compelled to do something, even if it was only symbolic. So, last month, I joined the NRA, the nation’s most effective civil rights organization, for the first time."
Tuesday, January 22. 2013
In the past two weeks, I have spoken with two people who have been stunned by this book: Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife.
It sounds like memories of a delirium to me, but who am I to gainsay a Harvard neurosurgeon?
"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the new wonderful good society which shall now be Rome’s, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious."
Marcus Tullius Cicero (h/t Vanderleun)
As I have mentioned here before, I don't know how it is possible to run a complex household effectively without two or more adults in it. We know that marriage has seen a marked decline in the lower socioeconomic strata, thus contributing to a vicious circle of poverty, malfunction and dependency. From what I have read, marriage is still going strong in the middle and upper-middle strata. I suspect that is because middle class people desire a coherent, orderly, busy life which is enriching to everybody in the family - and one reason why divorce is so traumatic: it's not just about money, it's about structure.
From Exodus from Marriage:
“The scale of marital breakdown in the West since 1960 has no historical precedent and seems unique,” the distinguished historian Lawrence Stone said a few years ago. “At no time in history, with the possible exception of Imperial Rome, has the institution of marriage been more problematic than it is today.”
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