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.
Yesterday, Jason Collins came out as the first openly gay, active, NBA player. Collins is a center for the Washington Wizards and is supposedly the first active professional sports player to come out. I don't think that's true. After all, several female players, such as Brittany Griner who is going pro this year, are openly gay. I'd even argue that if you didn't know Martina Navratilova was a lesbian during her time on the pro tour, you just weren't paying attention. Of course, she wasn't 'open' about it. Not sure how more open she could've been, but it was pretty evident to me and I was only a teen.
But Collins is, supposedly, big news. Big enough to be a top story on every major sports and news broadcast. In fact, I can't get away from it this morning. It's getting more than a reasonable amount of coverage on every morning TV show.
After that, presumably the warming crisis will resume to great alarm. No wonder they have changed the name to "Climate Change." Can't go wrong there, because weather happens. Here in the Northeast, climate tends to change daily, and seasonally too.
Hey, y'all. Your Editor is back from one of the the Georgia barrier islands which is pure nature preserve except for a 2-acre compound of rustic cabins. 5 days without radio, car, TV, or intertunnel but with constant hiking, birding, snake-watching, gator-dodging, skeeter-slapping, biking, skiffing, etc. while thriving on real Southern low-country home cookin with all very jolly and congenial family-style meals (which they term "food events") and SweetWater Beer on tap. No hot tubs, heated pools, or even DVD players. Not even a single golf course. Well, they did have a few pickup trucks with seats on the back for the daily 7 AM birding events. (My recent posts were pre-posted).
No flight delays, system worked like a charm. Flew into JAX, rental car, got to Saint Simons in time to catch the small outboard out to Little Saint Simons Island. 12-24 guests, 10,000 untouched acres of maritime forest and 7 miles of ocean beachfront without a soul on it - unless shore birds have souls. No roads, just sand tracks. For a Yankee, that ocean water was balmy in April.
At Dr. Merc's request, I will get organized and gradually post a few of the over 60 pics I took. Those barrier islands have interesting ecologies.
And I will post my bird list (our team easily went over 100 species in just a few days).
This is a bit of good thing for Mamet - he gets to be a cultural outsider again, which is a legitimate stance for an artist. And his critics at the Times? The Times is written by people who wish they were Mamet.
Do not miss this speech - it is fascinating video: The State of White America. It's 60+ info-packed minutes. Murray is like a statistically-armed de Toqueville for our time. I needed to hear it twice. The guy is delightful to listen to.
It's not really about politics, but he does mention American principles, American Exceptionalism, and what is required for a self-governing citizenry. "Self-governing," of course, has a dual meaning.
A lot of it is about class and "social capital" in America.
One quote from him: "The upper middle class seems to be keeping all the good stuff to itself: religion, marriage, morality, civic and social engagement, industriousness, and long work hours..."
Another: "The federal government can be accused of confusing itself with the rooster who believes that his crowing is what makes the sun rise..."
Another: "Marriage civilizes men." (Yes, the gals do try, don't they? And we guys fight back, pathetically, by not shaving on Saturday morning.)
Another useful phrase: "The people who makes things more difficult for their fellow citizens..."
All very interesting and relevant. I don't care much about class, college degrees, or elitism, but I do care about integrity, responsibility, curiosity, industriousness, and a number of other character traits. And of course I do care about traditional American culture and the work ethic. Like Murray, I do not buy into the European "relaxation" ethic and the aspiration for a stress-free life: humans are not cattle, and cannot have dignity or pride without being productive or constructive in whatever ways they can find. Anybody can make themselves useful if they want to.
Bird Dog should be arriving back from his trip down to Georgia today. If'n he a'starts tawkin' lak dis and usin' de word y'all ever'where an' a'callin' hisself Bird Dawg, we'll ask him to shorten his vacation next time.
Interesting News
Well, I suppose we should start off with the serious stuff, like how soon we're all going to die from global colding. If you read my article here, you're aware that science has now established that all of the warming over the past century is a direct result of global colding, and estimates of our continued existence range anywhere from 35 years to 35 minutes.
In regards to our slow deployment from Afghanistan over the next year, from the movie 'Rambo III':
Mousa: This is Afghanistan. Alexander the Great try to conquer this country, then Genghis Khan, then the British. Now Russia. But Afghan people fight hard, they never be defeated.
The recording, a wax-and-cardboard disc, contains the voice of Bell counting aloud, rattling off different percentages and dollar figures, and stating his name, date and address.
And to think; we're still using discs 128 years later. Alex, old boy, you were way ahead of the curve.
On the gender front, it's nice to see Washington state finally doing something about the horrific bias built into the language that relegates poor, defenseless females to the role of second-class citizens:
The war on the English language from gender-neutrality advocates has reached new lows in Washington state, where the governor signed a new piece of legislation dictating that the terms "fisherman," "freshman," and "penmanship" all be replaced because of alleged sexism. "Fisherman" will now be "fisher"; "freshman" will now be "first-year student"; "penmanship" will now be "handwriting."
First comment:
Well, ain't that a bitch!
Speaking of oppressed minorities, my buddy Shutterbug is a Mac aficionado and incorporates all things Mac into her life (iPhone, iPad, iCar, iHubby), so I sent her the following iArticle which she iAppreciated so much I thought I should iPost it here.
On the other hand, why a phone that can connect to the greatest collection of lies, half-truths and outright spin in the history of mankind is called 'smart' is anybody's guess.
Excuse me, I meant peoplekind.
On a non-news note, I made a pretty nifty discovery the other day. As it turns out, Google Translator isn't just for words or sentences. Entire, complete web pages are converted just by pasting in the URL. I wanted to send this page to a Cuban buddy of mine; ran it through Google Translator and here's what I sent him. That's pretty slick.
On the blogger scene, I think it'll be interesting watching to see if any right-wing bloggers pick up on a certain parallel.
Prior to our 2003 invasion of Iraq, it had been estimated that Saddam Hussein had murdered somewhere between 200,000 and 350,000 Iraqi Kurds with various weapons of mass destruction, Sarin gas (a cousin of the Mustard Gas used in WW I) being at the top of the list. There were also clues that Hussein was starting to think about putting together an atomic bomb, but the real factor was stopping a mass murderer the likes of which hadn't been seen since Cambodian Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge purge in the early 70's.
After the invasion, the liberal, anti-Bush MSM conveniently forgot that the term 'weapons of mass destruction' includes three categories; nuclear, chemical and biological and, when literally tons of Sarin gas was found but no nukes, Bush lied, thousands died! I covered this here.
So, here we are with a Democrat in the White House when suddenly...
The U.S. intelligence community has uncovered strong evidence that chemical weapons have been used in Syria. Several blood samples, taken from multiple people, have tested positive for the nerve agent Sarin, an American intelligence source tells Danger Room. President Obama has long said that the use of such a weapon by the Assad regime would cross a "red line."
In other words, if some half-baked Mid-Eastern potentate is using weapons of mass destruction on the citizenry, then we need to step in and stop him!
I haven't seen any of the right-wing bloggers pick up on this massive hypocrisy yet, but I assume they will as the story progresses.
Interesting song, written about Texas' War of Independence from the vantage point of a black Texan soldier. Later, adapted and adopted as a Confederacy song.
Executive decision-making is a skill. Good executive decision-making seems to be a talent. These are neither skills nor talents that I was blessed with, but that's probably just as well. I've never been much of a leader, and never a good follower either. My major life decisions have always made me nauseous. Medicine has been the right field for me. Independent work, endlessly interesting, and cautious, careful, conservative decision-making comes easily to me.
From Harvard Biz School, "While elevated narcissism and self-promotion has been shown to result in quicker promotion early in one's career, its negative impacts are revealed in positions of higher authority."
As in the sports world, in the biz world, if you cannot produce winning decisions consistently and with integrity, you will eventually go down. It's rough out there. I hear all of the stories and all of the excuses, but the most talented and honest do pretty well and never make excuses for their disappointments. Competition is a big part of life, and an exciting part of it.
The growth of school administrators, from public primary schools to private colleges, has been much commented on. I have no idea why it has been such a strong trend.
...aesthetics are not science: aesthetics do not show the same inbuilt tendency to improvement. From the aesthetic point of view what comes after is not necessarily better than what went before, and is often worse, even much worse. Particularly in an age of progress, however, men are reluctant to admit that they cannot do better than their forebears; to admit it is to admit the heresy that beauty’s arrow, unlike that of time, does not fly in one direction only. A return to the pattern or design of the past – dismissed as pastiche, the worst of all architectural crimes, far worse than destroying an immemorial townscape – would indicate a deficiency of imagination, inventiveness and originality, all the qualities that make the artist, at least in the romantic conception of the artist. And architects, in their own conception, are above all artists: artists, moreover, when it is widely believed that the purpose of art is to challenge, to question, to transgress, never to celebrate, to harmonise, to console, to give meaning.
It's all interesting, but I think Dalrymple's larger point is that, in life, unpleasant things: poverty, ugliness, cruelty, dishonesty, etc. are the default settings. Special qualities are required to move the dial above the default setting, whether for an individual or for a society.
But back to the arts: there is no "progress" in arts. Just changes of fashion.
In case you haven't heard the exciting news, Gwyneth Paltrow has been named People Magazine'sWorld's Most Beautiful Woman.
In honor of this lofty occasion, it's only fitting that we hear directly from this raving beauty, herself:
"I love the English way, which is not as capitalistic as it is in America. People don't talk about work and money; they talk about interesting things at dinner parties. I like living here because I don't tap into the bad side of American psychology, which is 'I'm not achieving enough, I'm not making enough, I'm not at the top of the pile.'"
"Brits are far more intelligent and civilised than Americans. I love the fact that you can hail a taxi and just pick up your pram and put it in the back of the cab without having to collapse it. I love the parks and places I go for dinner and my friends."
"I just had a baby and thought, 'I don't want to live there.'" International press reports had her deriding "Bush's anti-environment, pro-war policies" as either a "disgrace" or a "disaster."
If we presume the gang at People Mag are just as liberal as the rest of industry — which wouldn't be much of a stretch — it's no wonder they fell in love with this woman. In their minds, speakingtruth to power like the above earns her the honorific of Heroine.
For pics of the runners-up and the ravishing Ms. Paltrow, take your trembling hand and...
21:1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.
21:2 And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
21:3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them;
21:4 he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away."
21:5 And the one who was seated on the throne said, "See, I am making all things new." Also he said, "Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true."
21:6 Then he said to me, "It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.
Heard a Screech Owl calling early in the morning last week. I hope he finds the nest box I put up. They didn't find it last year.
The tiny Screech Owl lives across America, as long as there are plenty of trees around. If you want to attract a family of them to live at your place, put up a nest box for them. They do not mind living in suburban areas. I recently learned that they are breeding in New York's Central Park.
Now would be the time to do it. The box pictured is from Best Nest.
It's important to place the box correctly. The natural cavities that screech owls choose are typically 12 to 20 feet above the ground and in deep shade. As the female incubates the eggs, the male is apt to spend the day roosting in dense foliage within about 20 feet of the nest. After you've placed an inch or so of dried leaves in the bottom of the nest, hang it at least 10 feet up on the trunk of a large tree. Try to place it away from sidewalks or doors, since the owls vigorously defend their nests against perceived threats. In fact, when the young are near fledging, some unusually spunky adults may swoop down at people or pets who wander too close, even raking them with their claws. So while placing the box in as secluded a spot as possible is good for the owls, it might be better for us, too.
I greatly enjoy hearing them at night. A Great Horned Owl hooting had done the same to me a few weeks earlier. Good stuff. The mysterious world of the night.
That's right. He's a Connecticut Yankee in King Southern's Court.
So, lucky you, I'll be doing the morning links today and Monday. Although I appear to be the only blogger in the Western Universe who believes it, I don't think Sundays should be filled with the same bad news that the rest of the week is, so I'll skip it.
Interesting News
Well, I suppose we should start with what many are calling 'The Scandal of the Decade'.
Korean media is abuzz over the question after the Microsoft founder was photographed Monday holding his hand in his pocket as he exchanged greetings with Park Geun-hye.
I just love this picture:
I can easily see myself doing the same thing. "Well, howdy, Prez, howzit goin'?" Real geeks really are on a different plane than most people, and royalty, prestige and position simply don't carry the same weight that tight code, a quicker boot-up time and a well-designed web site do.
I hope the Koreans understand.
Under the heading of James Taranto's "Two Papers In One!", we have:
Like to buy stuff on the Internet? If the House approves a first-ever online sales tax, you might soon be paying a premium—and that’s a very good thing, writes Daniel Gross.
...because after I wrote the first post, it became clear to me that most people who are writing about it do not understand why this is onerous for small business.
She's lying, of course, but this is The Daily Beast, so one would expect that sort of thing. In this case, it's a lie by omission, because what she's not telling you in the above sentence is that she's only referring to small-time online retailers, like those guys who try to make a buck reselling stuff on eBay and Amazon. And just what percentage of the industry, Ms. McArdle, is that?
1%? 2%? 0.00031%?
People who are saying this is no big deal aren’t thinking things through.
For further information on why this is no big deal, please read my post here.
The Federal Reserve has mixed in new features to make the bill more difficult to replicate, like a blue security ribbon running down the front. When the bill is tilted, columns filled with the number "100" and tiny bells rotate. Tilt left to right and the columns move up and down; tilt up and down, the columns move left to right. The ribbon is woven onto the paper, not printed, making it tougher to duplicate. It's composed of thousands of lenses that magnify the marks and make them appear to move in different directions--not easy for a counterfeiter to remake in a basement.
This whole things smacks of a 'freedom of speech' violations and I'm sure the ACLU will immediately spring into action.
And, in a recent horrific event, the nation held its breath while we awaited the outcome of the...
Hours before the federal spending sequester began on March 1, when President Barack Obama predicted that "People are going to be hurt," he did not add, Trust me, I'll make sure of it. But he might as well have, as this week's furloughs of air traffic controllers make obvious.
The furloughs reflect panic: Having exaggerated their early predictions that the sequester's small reduction in spending growth would seriously affect Americans, many Democrats are hell-bent to pre-empt those Americans from drawing two logical conclusions: If one level of cuts is this painless, then maybe we should make ... more cuts to expenditures. And while we're at it, maybe we should ignore the politicians who told us that if Washington lowered the spending growth curve ... the Earth will fly into the sun.
If you've been paying any attention to this fraud, you'll have noticed that the MSM jumped right on board, boldly touting the serious repercussions when government spending is actually lowered. If I'm reading this right, the evil Republicans caused little children to cry because their White House tours were cancelled and the odds of your being eaten by a bear at Yellowstone Nat'l Park have increased dramatically.
On the subject of 'Lying To The People', in case you didn't catch the two AGW links in my post the other day, both of them are excellent.
The Associated Press has assured us, though, that this cold spell is not only consistent with a warming globe, it is actually caused by global warming. The proffered explanation is that cold weather in Europe is a result of melting sea ice in the Arctic. If this special pleading strikes you as unusually tendentious, it is all in the best tradition of explaining away ex post facto any weather event that appears to contradict the ruling paradigm.
After two decades of steady and substantial global temperature increase from 1980 to 1998, the pause in warming is causing a crisis for the climate crusade. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. The recent temperature record is falling distinctly to the very low end of the range predicted by the climate models and may soon fall out of it, which means the models are wrong, or, at the very least, something is going on that supposedly “settled” science hasn’t been able to settle. Equally problematic for the theory, one place where the warmth might be hiding—the oceans—is not cooperating with the story line. Recent data show that ocean warming has noticeably slowed, too.
That damn ocean. You just can't trust anyonething these days!
French news agency AFP reports that Ernesto Mauri, the chief executive of Mondadori France, the publisher of French gossip magazine Closer, Valerie Suau, a photographer at the regional daily La Provence, and La Provence’s general director, Marc Auburtin, are all under formal investigation for “breach of privacy” for allowing the photos of Duchess Kate sunbathing while on vacation to be taken and published.
If the Paparazzi Convention of 2012 gets nuked by some activist, I won't shed a tear. These have to be the scummiest people on earth. Their excuse is "But I gotta make a living!", failing to note that, at last count, there were approximately 7,304,346 different ways to make a living. All they're really saying is, "I gotta make a living... being scum." This strikes me as a serious mental disorder.
Speaking of which, I'm glad Rand Paul finally cleared the air on that drone business.
Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky), commended by many for his dramatic thirteen hour filibuster against the use of domestic drones, told Fox Business Network on Tuesday he's OK with drone strikes on American citizens who, for instance, rob a liquor store.
"If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and fifty dollars in cash. I don't care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him. But it’s different if they want to fly over your hot tub..."
So, to review, it's perfectly okay if a drone murders someone over a crummy fifty bucks — as long as it doesn't fly over your hot tub.
This guy's coming across just like his dad; brilliant 75% of the time, a total moron the other 25%.
In the video, the Portuguese Water Dog takes to the hunt with ease, tracking down the colorful eggs wherever they are hidden and then dutifully sitting next to his prizes.
So there is good news coming out of Washington these days.
Often titled "The Gladiator," the verses are originally from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage - Canto IV - Stanza 140.
I see before me the Gladiator lie: He leans upon his hand—his manly brow Consents to death, but conquers agony, And his droop’d head sinks gradually low— And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one, Like the first of a thunder shower; and now The arena swims around him—he is gone, Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hail’d the wretch who won.
He heard it, but he heeded not—his eyes Were with his heart, and that was far away; He reck’d not of the life he lost nor prize, But where his rude hut by the Danube lay, There were his young barbarians all at play, There was their Dacian mother—he, their sire, Butcher’d to make a Roman holiday— All this rush’d with his blood—Shall he expire, And unavenged?—Arise! ye Goths, and glut your ire!
The Unluckiest Generation: 
Bird Dog should be arriving back from his trip down to Georgia today. If'n he a'starts tawkin' lak dis and usin' de word y'all ever'where an' a'callin' hisself Bird Dawg, we'll ask him to shorten his vacation next time.
Often titled "The Gladiator," the verses are originally from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage - Canto IV - Stanza 140.