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.
When I graduated from medical school in 1962, the profession of medicine was for many graduates an opportunity to provide care—as distinguished from, though aligned with, treatment—and to provide it to individuals, not to populations or governmentally specified groups. Young doctors hoped to establish an independent business, enjoy lifelong intellectual excitement as knowledge and therapies expanded, and have an income sufficient to live decently and support a family. There have always been some who entered medicine, as with any vocation, to maximize income. Yet most of us who came into the profession in the early 1960s had modest financial aspirations and substantial social commitment...
...dangerously, schools of education impose “political litmus tests” on those who want to become public teachers. They vet students’ “dispositions,” especially their commitment to the left-wing notion of “social justice.” One of the most prestigious education schools in the country, Columbia University’s Teachers College, tells its students that teaching is a “political act.” Aspiring teachers are expected to be “participants in a larger struggle for social justice” and “to change the system and make schools and societies more equitable.”
Lukianoff points out the problem with such politicized pedagogy: “Vague, subjective, and politicized evaluation standards are dangerous. They invite administrators and faculty members to substitute their own opinions and political beliefs for fair, professional criteria to evaluate students’ demonstrated skills as members of a profession.” Competence, then, takes a backseat to political correctness, a problem rife in K-12 teaching credential programs, where knowledge of subject matter is less important than political ideology.
A friend told me the other night that he was served hot pepper mashed potatoes at the home of a friend in Delhi. I did not know they made mashed potatoes in India. He said it was so hot he was in agony.
Well, I like hot but I respect the sanctity of ordinary mashed taters. Nonetheless, I have to try it.
Here's one recipe (photo from the recipe, but ignore the steak. I think hot pepper taters would go well with anything grilled). Here's another.
Government interventions over the past four decades have yielded a cascade of perverse incentives, bureaucratic diktats, and economic pressures that together are forcing doctors to sacrifice their independent professional medical judgment, and their integrity. The consequence is clear: Many doctors from my generation are exiting the field. Others are seeing their private practices threatened with bankruptcy, or are giving up their autonomy for the life of a shift-working hospital employee. Governments and hospital administrators hold all the power, while doctors—and worse still, patients—hold none.
When it comes to running programs, it really doesn't matter how many other programs you have on your computer. Normal programs are 'static', just sitting there awaiting the call, and when you fire up a program, those are the only files being read.
It can, however, make a big difference on a few other levels, like running a virus scan, a fix-it program, or making an image file backup of the whole C Drive. More files means more time to scan, fix or copy. And since we're talking about files that might be multiple gigs in size, this is the real deal.
I've covered a couple of these in the past, but only in regards to a related subject. This time we'll look specifically at reducing the size of the C Drive.
There are five main areas of concern:
1. Getting rid of the 2 gigs of unnecessary backup files Windows 7 left after doing its big 'Service Pack' update
2. Getting rid of the 2-gig 'Hibernation' file
3. Getting rid of the 4-gig 'pagefile'
4. Cleaning out the 'Temp' folder
5. Scanning the drive for any large 'temp' files a program might have left
We shall pull out our #10 scalpel below the fold. Or blowtorch, if necessary.
Far too many Americans believe (or have been told to believe) that the Republican Party “doesn’t care about the poor, minorities, women, etc.” This is something I’ve written extensively about in previous articles. Republican candidates in red states and blue states alike need to start reaching out more aggressively to conservative women, Latinos, African-Americans, etc. Romney won a majority of males, whites, independents, middle class voters, and married women. In the past, that was always enough to form a 51% majority. Today, it’s not.
The GOP has maxed out the white conservative vote – Romney won more whites than any Republican candidate since 1988. There are far too many conservative women and minorities who are voting Democrat simply because they haven’t been reached out to. To the Obama campaign’s credit, the Democrats never stopped campaigning after 2008. They kept all their campaign offices open – especially in the swing states – and spent the last four years developing relationships, building trust, and keeping their message out there 24/7 with key demographics in targeted communities.
That’s all it took for the Democrats to win in 2012. It wasn’t a validation of progressive ideology.
I greatly enjoy contemplating urban issues. As someone who grew up frequenting NYC, I suppose my bias is towards the high-density, mixed-use (ie residential and commerce combined), mix of very old and brand-new buildings, and the mixed-use (ie residential and commerce combined) environment that makes downtown New York such a vibrant and constantly interesting place, day and night. The city that never sleeps.
If I could afford a pied a terre there, I would do it. (The only reason NYC real estate is so high is because of government controls.) Take the elevator down, say Hi to the doorman, walk seven blocks to a neighborhood French bistro or your favorite pub past all the people taking their dogs for a walk. Nice way of life. New Yorkers are skinny because they walk everywhere - including to work in the morning. Well, subway if it's over a mile I suppose but it depends on the person.
Here's the article: Houston Rising—Why the Next Great American Cities Aren’t What You Think - While urbanists and developers tout the oldest and priciest American cities, they ignore or deplore the real growth that’s happening in more spread-out urban newbies, writes demographer Joel Kotkin.
Germany, historically the model for the American educational system, has a far more practical system than America does today. We often forget that the traditional model for higher ed was designed for scholars, and teachers, some wealthy elites, and Protestant ministers.
We know that a minority, probably a small minority, of American college students are natural scholars or passionately curious. More want, or need, the credential.
It seems to me that much of the discussion of "mission" has to do with confusing "higher ed" with Liberal Arts education. I do not know how much of Higher Ed today is Liberal Arts and how much is vocationally-oriented (eg Nursing, Agricultural, Hospitality, Education, Law Enforcement, Business, Engineering, Communications, Performance Arts, etc etc, but I know that a lot of it is.)
Cornell for example, a strange hybrid of state university and private university, has 7 undergrad colleges. Only one of their undergrad schools is Liberal Arts, and many large universities are similar. It's been many years since "college" has meant Liberal Arts.
I think most of the angst is only about the "mission" and "purpose" of Liberal Arts higher ed. Nobody is confused about the "mission" or "purpose" of degrees in Nursing or Civil Engineering.
If any reader can find those Higher Ed stats, I'm sure we'd all be interested. Specifically, I'm interested in what % of US undergrads are attending vocationally-oriented colleges and programs compared to those doing Liberal Arts programs.
In 2009-2010, "college" in the US yielded 800,000 Associate degrees and 1.7 million Bachelors degrees.
Of the 1.7 million bachelor's degrees awarded in 2009–10, over half were concentrated in five fields: business, management, marketing, and personal and culinary services (22 percent); social sciences and history (10 percent); health professions and related programs (8 percent); education (6 percent); and psychology (6 percent) (see table A-38-1). The fields of visual and performing arts (6 percent), engineering and engineering technologies (5 percent), biological and biomedical sciences (5 percent), and communication and communications technologies (5 percent) represented an additional 21 percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded in 2009–10.
"College" doesn't mean what it used to mean. It used to mean Liberal Arts but now it can mean Hotel Management. The change has already happened.
Europe has three big problems: The return of the Reich (or the Holy Roman Empire, if you prefer), the return of the Ottomans, and the persistence of state socialism. Learned nothing at all from their long, crazy history.
It was a tiring, three-plane, 24-hour flight, getting in late the night before, April 7. We stayed at a delightfully friendly inn near the Prime Minister's residence, about a 15-minute stroll to the Old City. We slept and had a hearty breakfast from the inn's large, delicious buffet. After 2-minutes of sirens all over Israel during which all stop to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jason's Bar Mitzvah took place at 10:02AM on April 8 at the Haas Promenade overlooking all of Jerusalem, the Old City at the center of view. Here we're carrying the Torah to the Promenade, then part of the view over Jerusalem (hazy due to a sand storm in Saudi Arabia blowing sand far into Jerusalem's skies).
Instead of a long post with deeper observations, maybe to come later, instead this post will simply present some of the joy on Jason and younger brother (8) Gavin's faces at their experiences. (Jason was totally jazzed, and performed his prayers and Torah portion with enthusiasm and ease. Gavin was a bit jet-lagged in the morning of the 8th but recovered his boisterous energy and spirits by noon.) A few photos with me may sneak in. But. for me, these of Jason and Gavin are the most important. Look back at your albums. The photos of sites are nice momentos but the photos of your children at the sites are the heart that beats and stirs.
Both boys rose to be champion travelers, terrifically behaved and engaged, and their reflections on what they saw and experienced have been all that a father could hope for from this exposure to the land, history, and traditions of our Jewish religion and peoples. Jason acts and takes seriously that he is now a young man, with such responsibilities following this core rite of passage. Gavin says he will be nicer after experiencing and discussing the centrality in our faith of replacing bad with good in ourselves and the world, bolstered by meeting so many pleasant Israelis and visitors from all over the globe.
(Many more photos below the fold; There is a 10-hour difference between California and Israel, so the dates on the photos reflect San Diego time, not Israel's)
Update: I'm up in Homestead at the moment taking care of a computer meltdown at a business ($$), then, as long as I'm this far north, I'm planning on heading up to Miami Beach for a few days to visit a friend, so I'll postpone those two big pieces I've mentioned until next week.
In the meantime...
First, when I'm wrong about something, I admit it. That's how we grow.
As it turns out, I was wrong about the new Internet Exploder version 10. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!
They did make an improvement.
Now, in my defense, I should note that they haven't made an actual, visible improvement in over a decade, so I admit I wasn't specifically looking for one, slacker that I am.
It now has a spell-checker. A real, live spell-checker, utilizing the latest modern software innovations, direct from the late 80's when the first spell-checker hit the scene. The fact that IE now utilizes this valuable late-80's technology speaks highly of the programming team.
Quickly going the other direction is Firefox. They've changed how the download box works and it's now a minor pain. Normally, it's an independent box, so you can do whatever you want with the browser, including closing it, and the downloads keep to themselves. This is also how IE does it.
It's now part of the actual browser, and if you click elsewhere, it disappears. And it's even more confusing with multiple windows and downloads going, so the whole thing comes across as kinda dumb.
The trick is to hit Ctrl-J, which will open the old independent downloads box. ('J' for 'Just the box') You can also open it from the Tools menu or the 'Download' button, 'Show all downloads'. They've eliminated the 'Pause' button for no known reason, but you can still pause the download by right-clicking on it. And, best, it means we don't have to worry about keeping browser windows open or not.
Dear Firefox:
It only took four of us, but we finally figured out how to use your new update correctly. Yippee for us!
" Bloomberg is an authoritarian. He's not an authoritarian in the way Josef Stalin or Pol Pot was authoritarian, but every instinct tells you he's a man who would use any power given to him to govern every aspect of public and private life whenever necessary -- or, more precisely, whenever he finds it necessary, which is frequently. All said, he's exactly the type of person who makes the Constitution a necessity.
Anyone who believes your caloric intake is government's prime concern should be watched carefully..."
There is no "should". This foolish and, I think, exhibitionistic piece in the WSJ, How Often Should Married Couples Have Sex?, has been getting attention all over. I don't think it is very illuminating. Sexual frustration, however, does make both guys and gals cranky, and tends to make them want to look elsewhere for their instinctual romantic and sensual drives (which normal people do anyway, but even more so).
In my professional opinion, younger guys seem to be OK and relatively calm with sex twice daily. They are monkeys. Older fellows seem to get by with anywhere from daily to 3-4 times/week, depending on how hard and long they work at their jobs. Women are an entirely different topic, but my general advice to women is to remove the TV from the bedroom. Not to worry ladies - they will put it back in our bedrooms 24 hrs/day when we're demented widows in the nursing home. We can catch up with our shows and movies then. Carpe diem.
Apropos of the topic, I saw that Glenn Reynolds linked this book: Lube Jobs: A Woman's Guide to Great Maintenance Sex. Library journal commented about it, "Most people spend the largest part of their adulthood slogging through committed relationships, and they need books like this."
Good cozy marital snuggles can make up for a lot of troubles. But "slogging"? If you're slogging, it's your own darn fault. I have patients deep into their 70s and 80s with quite satisfying and jolly sex lives even when they know far more than they want to know about their spouses, and when their equipment is not what it once was. We are, in part, biological beings.
I've been an admirer of Heather MacDonald for years and we have linked her essays many times, but it was not until last week when I read her review of the 2013 new productions at the Metropolitan Opera that I felt motivated to find out who she really is. She is versatile. I admire/envy her brain and her fearlessness.
She is a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a frequent researcher/reporter/pundit at City Journal and many other places. She lives in NYC. I guess she qualifies as a "public intellectual." I've never heard her speaking on TV, but we don't watch TV here.
Were she a Leftie, she'd be a star at The NYT, the WaPo, TNR, or anywhere.
I hope to have the chance to meet her sometime. If I had the spare $, I'd be a significant donor to the Manhattan Institute and meet some of the folks I admire like Rudy Giuliani, Heather MacDonald, Roger Kimball, John Leo, Kay Hymowitz, et al.
For the time being, I've decided to split the difference and keep the Internet line but dump some other things (I was actually getting a little tired of Netflix anyway), enabling me to further corrode your mind with inane movie reviews, subliminally imply you should dump your job to concentrate full-time on engaging computer games, warp and usurp your very being by tempting you to leave the warm bosom of alcohol and join the ranks of the pothead, ravage and destroy your last vestige of reason with a heartwarming post on the swastika — and that's not to mention filling your sleep with nightmares of gigantic, human-gobbing insects.
So I plan to be busy.
Also, under the heading of "Duh!", my thanks to BobZ for mentioning starting up a wi-fi from scratch. I had tried a unit out, just to see if there was anything around, but I hadn't thought of getting one of the line-of-sight neighbors around me to let me hook into their (duh!) Comcast cable line (!), then beam me a signal. I'll have to shell out for the hook-up, but it looks like the service, itself (as an add-on to the cable line), is only $20/mo, so I'll start asking around. It'll be wi-fi slow, but what price, freedom?
I'll be on the road today, but have a couple of promised goodies ready for tomorrow and Friday. My post tomorrow on 'Meaningless Words' is a hoot.
Again, my deepest thanks to those who donated a little something to help me out of this bind, and if I can get a wi-fi going and dump the expensive Internet company, I should definitely be in the clear. This morning I'm going up to Homestead to talk to another prospective web site client, so things are lookin' good. I also made an appointment for next Friday at the hospital to do some extensive blood tests.
In the meantime, here are two of the best AGW articles I've read in a while:
Not in $ terms, not anymore. In other ways, perhaps. Connections, networking, first spouses, intellectual fun, etc.However, these days it's the sub-Ivy networkswho take the best care of their grads.Georgetown, Boston College, Bucknell, Duke, Syracuse, Indiana -their loyal alum networks work hard to make sure every grad finds a good first job to launch a career of hard white-collar work.
With the gun control measure failing miserably in the Senate, it's thought that the next thing Congress will turn its attention to is an online sales tax.
As the bloggers fall all over themselves decrying this outrage to humanity, bear in mind that the entire sales tax issue is inconsequential compared to what's really going on.
I thought the following deserved a repost at this point in time.
Congress has only been talking about taxing online goods for, oh, about as long as the online has existed. But without any kind of precedent or track record to go from, they could never pull it off.
A wave of states, including Virginia, have passed laws that will require consumers to pay sales tax on all Internet purchases as soon as next year.
For states struggling in the troubled economy, this could mean $23 billion in new revenue each year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Had online retailers collected sales tax this year, Virginia would have added nearly $423 million to its coffers, while Maryland would have seen $376 million and the District $72 million, the group said.
Now they have a track record (at least on paper) to point to and, sure enough:
The movement in state capitals is driving newfound support for a proposed bill in Congress that could make collection of sales tax a standard practice on the Web, no matter where a consumer logs in to shop.
Like you, my hackles bristle reading such words, because the Web is supposed to be free, Free,FREE! Always has been, always should be.
A friend told me the other night that he was served hot pepper mashed potatoes at the home of a friend in Delhi. I did not know they made mashed potatoes in India. He said it was so hot he was in agony.
When it comes to running programs, it really doesn't matter how many other programs you have on your computer. Normal programs are 'static', just sitting there awaiting the call, and when you fire up a program, those are the only files being read.
I've been an admirer of Heather MacDonald for years and we have linked her essays many times, but it was not until last week when I read her review of 
After all, Spring is here and it's been a long cold winter in New Hampshire. Here 'tis:
Turbulence