Saturday, January 5. 2013
Simple cozy home. Nice Nantucket-style front stairway. Practical.
Friday, January 4. 2013
 The Brits and Aussies call it "Cottage Pie."
Why "Shepherd's"? Because it is traditionally made with ground lamb or mutton. That's how Alton Brown makes it.
Americans use ground beef, usually. Ground mutton is not a typical supermarket item. Go ahead and use instant mashed potato if you must - the recipe don't care.
I am hoping some Mom will try each of the recipes in this series, and report back on family response.
Reposted:
A resource for those driving around New England this year: Historic Houses of New England -open to the public.
Paul Revere's house below:
 Readers know my interest in the workings of the human conscience and the structures of human morals. The (our) devils are relentless in pursuit of the low-life, the dark side.
Hawkins at Pajamas: Here ... are a few signposts that will alert you to stop, pause, and take stock to make sure you’re not on that gentle slope.
 The Homeschool Diaries
A free ad for Angie's List. We use it for almost everything these days. It's a great biz concept.
Crony Capitalist Blowout - A tax increase for everyone but the favored wealthy few.
McFortress - An antigun newspaper avails itself of the Second Amendment.
Former Democratic NYC Mayoral Candidate Equates Gun Owners to Child Molesters
FBI: More People Killed with Hammers, Clubs Each Year than Rifles
$822,000 Worker Shows California Leads U.S. Pay Giveaway
So What's Next, Mr. President? Nearly every decision made during Obama's presidency has been conducted under the canopy of catastrophe.
Krauthammer: Return of the Real Obama - The president is dedicated to the expansion of the welfare state:
Now he’s won. The old Obama is back. He must not be underestimated. He has deftly leveraged his class-war-themed election victory (a) to secure a source of funding (albeit still small) for the bloated welfare state, (b) to carry out an admirably candid bit of income redistribution, and (c) to fracture the one remaining institutional obstacle to the rest of his ideological agenda.
Not bad for two months’ work.
Gloom update: America: Doomed by Scarcity, Doomed by Plenty, Doomed, Doomed!
BBB's charity ratings, seal of approval under fire
Another Pigford government fraud?
Thursday, January 3. 2013
 The Mommys of America commonly made winter casseroles using cans of Campbell's soups. Mushroom soup, especially. We're getting into Hotdish territory here.
In the good old days, eating in restaurants was not routine as it is now, but instead was a special treat for birthdays and anniversaries. Take-out Chinese, much less Thai or sushi, did not exist. Moms used to have food budgets, but no more because good food has, blessedly, become such a small component of an American family budget.
I sure hope moms still make stuff like this: Easy Creamy Chicken Casserole because it is good, and heart-warming. Ritz cracker topping. Wow. Put it on white rice.
Then home-made chocolate pudding for dessert with Jiffy Whip or Cool Whip on top. Perfection. Thanks, Moms of America!
How's that for a catchy end-of-holiday-season header? (Metazoans is the new name for the Animalia Kingdom - those creatures with differentiated tissues like sponges, earthworms, and people.)
I have been attempting to familiarize myself a little with the rapidly-expanding science of Epigenetics lately. When I took pre-med Genetics, it was a marginal topic. Now that the fundamental workings of DNA are fairly well understood, epigenetics has become a hot field ("epi" because it's the things - heritable things - that effect cell-differentiation, growth and development, etc. on top of the basic DNA template, but are affected by the environment). Shades of Lamarck.
Epigenetics is interesting partly because it's one of the ways that a metazoan species can be affected by environmental influences during growth and development. Molecular tools for shaping the final product. The complexity of metazoans (as contrasted with fungi, bacteria, and protozoans, for example) requires complex epigenetic processes. Heritable things which switch on or switch off gene expression.
Here's the simplest short piece I could find: What Is Epigenetics? Easy to follow if you ever took intro Bio.
The wiki entry is actually a good intro, but tough sledding unless you had a decent college education or are a bio reader.
Over the next few decades, we can expect interesting new discoveries about how epigenetic processes affect human psychology.
I have spared our readers all of the more technical and experimental things I've been reading. If I can interest one person in the topic, great.
Al Gore may not have invented the internet or Global Warming, but his name will be forever associated with both. He certainly found ways to profit from these themes.
Now he's found a way to profit from TV, which he never claimed to invent, but hoped to 're-invent' with his Current TV network. An unwatched network airing questionable programming, pursuing a bizarre agenda that was mildly anti-American to most of us. Well, now he's out of the TV business and turning the reins over to another crowd of potentially anti-American broadcasters.
I can see the conspiracy theorists lining up behind this one.
If Al-Jazeera somehow turns the U.S. into a Muslim nation, will Al Gore take credit for being the founding father of Islamic U.S.A.?
From Peter Cove: Work, not welfare, uplifts the poor. He begins:
Nearly half a century ago, I dropped out of graduate school and enlisted as a foot soldier in America’s War on Poverty. Today, I’m still on the front lines, working to move people out of dependency and into employment. But with an important difference: I’ve become fed up with the useless policies that I once supported, and I’m trying to change the strategy of our bogged-down army...
h/t, Ace.
As a small side note, if you've been thinking about checking out the great Google Earth program, do so now. This Saturday we're going to hold a little GE 'easter egg hunt' which should be both informative and fun. It should, in turn, spawn an interesting post of the collected results. If you want to join in, it'll be helpful if you already know how to use this most intriguing of programs.
 I'm surprised I haven't blundered across this before now, but check out this cool Firefox update page. I needed pretty much everything on the list.
Along with Adobe Reader for PDF files and the ubiquitous Flash, I recommend the QuickTime plugin for the occasional QT video and Java for older sites that are using Java instead of Flash for various special effects.
As far as Firefox's various problems with Flash, it appears some of it's been ironed out recently. Both have come out with updates since my post on it a month ago and I haven't seen any snags since then. If you've been having problems, I suggest running the Flash uninstall program before updating.
On the subject, the other common Flash problem is running into a 'Currently unavailable' message when trying to play a YouTube video either from the main site or from a page with an embedded YouTube video. This is YouTube making a little experiment with selected members using a new viewing protocol called 'HTML5', and apparently they don't like you using that old, hackneyed Flash player on their precious videos. The solution is to go here and click on the link at the bottom to opt out of the program.
Our pal Sipp crawled into his well-air-conditioned office in Maine to offer this thought about the blue house pics I posted on Tuesday night:
That's a beautiful house. Front-gabled Greek Revival. Mid-1800s. It was so common it was called the "National Style" back then. After the War of 1812, Americans didn't want to build their houses in the Adam (British) style anymore. They were captivated by the Greek War of Independence from the Ottomans, and got interested in everything ancient Greek because it was considered a chaste, proto-Roman civilization. I can't see all that much in the pictures for evidence of what's going on, but the house in the front is original. The big thing in the back was probably a barn at first. That huge chimney on the barn is pretty modern. It was probably attached to the main house by the ell you see between them. (In Maine, they called something similar Little House, Big House, Back House, Barn, with the little house being the "ell" and being built first) The ell might have been one-story at first. When horses and servants went out of fashion, the barn was turned into more house, most likely, and a second floor added to the ell to have unfettered access back and forth. The wart on the side might have been an open porch, or been missing entirely at first. Nobody ganged windows like that back then.
I doubt that big house in back was ever a barn, but I get the point.
How good is this little patch, up high above the Connecticut river? You have several of your basic old-timey styles, and I'd bet they were all built by the same family on the same lot over time and generations (no estate taxes and no zoning then), middle one first - I'd guess around 1750-1780:
Wednesday, January 2. 2013
Fear and loathing of income inequality is both totally understandable and ultimately misplaced.
Income inequality, if it is a problem (I do not see why it is) it is easy to fix. Just tax all income over $40,000 at 100% (except for politicians and bureaucrats).
Then confiscate all private assets over $100,000. (except for politicians and bureaucrats), because assets are really more important in life than income. Let's make it fair. Why focus on income? Some people have huge houses and apartments, and small families. The government can provide the manna. It worked great in China and the Soviet Union, so why not here?
Income and asset inequalities are fine with me. Money provides choices. Many people are highly motivated by such things, and they make good things happen. My job, for example, which pays me enough to afford ski trips to Whistler which, in turn, provides jobs for Canucks.
I don't care too much about people's energy use, and, if people want to live in McMansions two hours from work, so be it.
However, I do object to the subsidization of urban and suburban sprawl by tax-supported highways. I also object to the public subsidization of home ownership via the mortgage tax deduction. (I am a flat-taxer.) From the Globe:
Nathaniel Baum-Snow of Brown University found that each new highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18 percent. The home mortgage interest deduction further encouraged suburbanization, because rental units are disproportionately in cities while owner-occupied homes are disproportionately distant from city centers.
Note - sorry, those older links are now behind a paywall. Greedy capitalists at the Boston Globe are messing up our efforts to give them business.
Tuesday, January 1. 2013
And cold, beady-eyed Red-Tails hunkering in the trees.
It's always been a challenge for me to capture the features of a Black Lab's face. How about you?
That "6 and a half" year-old tags along to learn about hunting and dog-handling. He can handle a .22, however. Start them young, and keep the country traditions alive before they become overly-citified, overly-metrosexualized, and overly-computerized.
More Yankeeland architectural pics tomorrow. One aspect of the traditional ethos is to make a home appear humbler and smaller, than it is. One way to do that is to make them narrow in the front, but to run on in the back with endless additions and attachments.
This is not an inn, it's a family homestead. Could have been an inn at some point in history. Here's the full view, behind the trees, Hard to determine which part came first, but Sipp can probably explain the cobbling here. I tend to guess that the Federal front part came second, but I can't be sure:
Good advice, for bloggers and for everyone, from Wizbang:
Never say anything you would not be willing to repeat under oath.
Never say or write anything you would not want to see plastered across the front page of the newspaper.
Never write when you can speak.
Never speak when you can nod.
Never nod when you can wink
Well, I am not a winker but I would add, as lawyers always advise, "Say it in flowers, say it in mink, but never, ever, say it in ink." I'm afraid that I break all of these rules, daily, as I have a perverse tendency to actively resist PC just for the fun of it. Fortunately, I have no employer to object. That's the Maggie's Ideal Way of Life.
We frequently point out, here at Maggie's, the similarities between modern Progressivism/Leftism and Feudalism. Of course, Hayek nailed this years ago.
Lifson says it better than I can. He begins:
The changes wrought on the American political economy by progressives have taken us in the unmistakable direction of feudalism. The morphological resemblance between the progressive version of America and the historic feudal regimes of Western Europe and Japan is obvious if one takes a few moments to consider the changes in the proper context.
Remember flying a kite as a kid? It's a pretty simple task, really, in the sense that (1) all you have to do is hold onto the string, and (2) as you proved, even a kid can do it.
And I'm sure you know that there are people who can make kites do some pretty nifty tricks, like barrel rolls and loops and all that.
And what's extra special is when you get three people flying three kites together, performing a beautiful aerial ballet.
Or two people flying three kites.
Or one.
Happy New Year, y'all!
 "The encouragement of a proper hunting spirit, a proper love of sport, instead of being incompatible with a love of nature and wild things, offers the best guaranty of their preservation."
Theodore Roosevelt
Pic is Emeril's roast pheasants on wild-mushroom bread pudding. A wild mushroom risotto would be good as an alternative, or mashed taters.
I am bird-hunting today with Gwynnie, a real dog, and some friends. 20 ga., not binoculars. Hope our readers have a fine and jolly day too. I am in fine fettle, having only indulged in one beer last night, and early to bed. With a little luck, some pheasants for a late dinner tonight and a little vino.
 US on Pace for Slowest Decade of Population Growth Since 1930s
Mead: Why did God choose the Jews?
Sentimentalizing Serial Murder - A recent book exemplifies the erosion of moral judgment in Britain.
Public Funding for Stadiums Jumps the Shark in MiamiTop 10 Food Policy Success Stories of 2012 - This year had its share of good news for supporters of food freedom. Two interesting infographics were published recently that make it so easy to see the decline of the West, even a caveman can do it.Are you ready? ObamaCare: Pain 2.0 Health costs on top of tax hikes Health care law may mean less hiring in 2013Krauthammer: Obama showed´incredible arrogance´ in´astonishing´ press conference
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Between the woods and frozen lake, on Tuesday
When 
