Monday, April 15. 2013
 Ugh. I think I'm going to have to give up my Internet connection for a while until I get well. At $120/mo, it's my biggest expense after rent. The reason it's so high is because I moved about a year ago and ended up behind the local cellphone tower, which, as it turns out, is very directional. My faithful Verizon Wireless wouldn't work, nor would a Sprint unit I tried. I hunted around and finally found a company that specializes in rural areas and I ended up with an actual box with a 3' antenna sitting on top of it. While slow and expensive, at least it works.
As I noted a month ago, I've kind of peaked-out at around 75% recovery after my tumor operation last summer and the doctors want to run a whole slew of expensive tests. You know how doctors and dentists are. Money's no object in their little worlds.
Between ditching the Internet and some other things, I can save about $250/mo, which should enable me to keep up with the hospital payments so the tests can continue until they figure out what's wrong. Thankfully, there's a nearby library that has a bunch of computers I can use for my webmastering maintenance job. I might also make the occasional post here, but I'd hate the idea of not being able to read and respond to the comments. That interaction is often the best part of blogging.
The cut-off date is Wednesday next week, so I don't have to make the decision immediately. If anyone would like to help out this poor wretched soul, my tumor operation link is here. Anything would be appreciated. Cutting off my Internet is going to be like cutting off an arm, but I've got to do something. Health is more important than anything else at this point.
I will, however, be (temporarily) leaving the online community with a flourish. I have a handful of pieces I've been working on for a while, including a review and manual for the greatest 'war sim' ever developed, an existential treatise on the meaninglessness of certain words ("smarter" and "truth" top the list), and the revelation of an amazing secret being kept from 38 million Americans. The right-wing bloggers have been pounding and pounding a certain false truth into you for a decade and, to their shame and disgrace, 38 million people have been kept from this great revelation. This article will help balance the scales. Look for it Friday as the week's 'capper'.
Also, another installment of History's Mysteries, this time dealing with that horrific Nazi swastika. Fun for the whole family. And, like the way I refer to my AGW opus as "the last article on global warming you'll ever need to read", similarly, I've written the last article on marijuana you'll ever need to read. Remember, legalized pot is considered a lefty issue by the right-wing bloggers, because pot was popularized by all of those smelly radical left-wing hippies back in the day, so it's perfectly understandable if they spin the argument against it. Hot Air (and Theo) ran an anti-pot video a while back that was so filled with outright lies, disingenuous lies, and lies by omission that it rivaled the worst of the AGW spewage.
And that's saying a lot.
So, there's your update. I'll just be posting a Computin' Tip later on today. The good stuff starts tomorrow and will run through next Tuesday. After that, I cannot say.
 Triple play: Because Satan Is a Yankees Fan
The Real Reason No One's Buying PCs Anymore: They've Gotten Too Good
Or...Did Windows 8 kill PC sales?
Paul LePage: Beretta, Colt and Magpul—Come to Maine
Senate Uses Doctors for Gun Control
NYT Admits Union Pensions Aren’t Sacred
Media Acknowledge Blowing Gosnell Story, Pledge Extensive Coverage
L.A. Times: "Immigration bill would spark surge of legal arrivals"
James Lovelock: A man for all seasons - The guru of Gaia is a maverick environmentalist who supports fracking and nuclear power. Does he believe the human race has a future?
The Left's Fantasy of Progress
Study: CA High-Speed Rail Will Lose $124-$373 Million A Year
Top Obamacare Adviser: Doctors Told to Focus on “Cost Value” and Volume… Not the Patient
GosnellGate: It’s the A-Word
Professor Yarbrough responds, re the Bowdoin expose
Jesus Never Said I Couldn’t Paint the Baby
The Decline of Obama - How to lose friends and influence.
Frank Bruni on politicians as love gluttons
Sultan:
Kermit Gosnell will be locked up. There will be a brief spurt of inspections. And then things will go on as before and the empowerment educators who wear "I Had an Abortion" t-shirts while they drive to the soccer games of their children in some placid suburb will sleep well at night knowing that somewhere in Philly, NYC and LA there are rough men doing violence to the wombs of desperate women and the lives of their unborn children on behalf of their ideologies and policies. Rough men in dark places doing he inevitable dirty work in the world they made.
Via Ricochet's The Price of Utopia:
Now is the time when we, as feminists, can show we're not afraid to confront the difficult and unpleasant realities of abortion -- the disturbing bloody images, the fact that sometimes women don't actually have a Very Good Reason to be seeking one, and even the unfortunate physical and emotional consequences that sometimes follow. Once we acknowledge that these things are there and real and unpleasant, we can continue to assert our right to do it anyway, and in doing this, remove their power over us.
Reminder: Obama supported infanticide
Huge gender gap persists in college degrees but gets no attention
Bernie Sanders: Warming is not a hoax
Californians Sign Petition to Ban and Confiscate Firearms
Capriles almost won in Venezuela
Sunday, April 14. 2013
I was chatting, this weekend, about how trolleys became obsolete when cars and buses developed. Buses are far more flexible, subways are quicker, and people love their cars. The Model T killed the trolley. With car traffic, trolleys are not much faster than walking. I have to admit, though, that the trolleys - and subways - in Vienna are great and easy for a tourist to figure out. However, Vienna has little car traffic.
I missed this one: Was the Rise of Car Ownership Responsible for the Midcentury Homeownership Boom in the US?
I heard this fellow Tom Corley interviewed on the radio last week. He studies the life habits of prosperous people compared to less prosperous people.
He said nothing surprising. For a few examples, he said the prosperous tend to delay gratification, exercise, set life goals, make life plans, volunteer, severely restrict their kids' TV and computer time, set examples of hard work and self-discipline for their kids, to be constructive with their time, and to be frugal except in matters of health and charity.
Sounds old-fashioned, doesn't it? Socio-cultural-character tendencies. These things have not made me rich, but they have made my life better. People tease me about my frugality, but I am never frugal about truly life-enriching things and I hate being slothful. God did not make me to sit on my butt.
I have been saving two links about Tallis' 2011 book, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity, until I found time to say something interesting about the ideas. I could not add anything, as it turned out, because Mark Signorelli says it so well in his review.
Tallis, a neurologist (and amateur and impressive philosopher) wrote the book as a critique of biological and evolutionary reductionism.
Here's a brief review from the WSJ.One quote:
In his vigorously argued "Aping Mankind," Raymond Tallis takes on what he calls "neuromania" (the belief that we are our physical brains and nothing more) and "Darwinitis" (the insistence that our consciousness can be reduced to evolutionary terms) in a robust defense of the unique nature of human consciousness. Mr. Tallis, a doctor and researcher in clinical neuroscience, believes that most contemporary accounts of human consciousness fail to understand the lived experience of individual minds. Reducing man to simply another animal in a real sense de-humanizes us, with disastrous effects in areas from social policy to the interpretation of art and literature, which the author touches on in engaging asides.
Here's a quote from an Amazon reviewer:
Aping Mankind is negative research. While most popular-science writers attempt to weave compelling stories from the latest neuroscience experiments to explain 'why we are the way we are', Tallis attempts to show why these stories simply cannot be true. If you are skeptical of media--and scientific journal--headlines such as "Researchers discover the location of love in the brain", then you may enjoy Aping Mankind. In this work Tallis exposes the odd proclivity of scholars, from biologists to literary critics, to anthropomorphize pieces of matter while simultaneously dehumanizing human beings. In effect we are systematically transferring our humanity to matter, and this may not be good for our health--just like vitamins.
Returning to Signorelli's impressive review which opens like this:
I can recall very clearly the moment at which the spread of Darwinian ideology became a matter of concern for me. Previously, I had been acquainted with such ideology, and recognized it as but one more strain of fashionable cant, promoted by a set of persons quite obviously unfamiliar with elementary philosophical reasoning. Having attended college in the late twentieth century, I, like many of my generation, simply became accustomed to dwelling in an intellectual atmosphere poisoned by noxious dogmas, whether deconstructionist, multi-cultural, or what have you; Darwinism was evidently just such another doctrine, and so I took no great alarm at its prevalence. That changed one evening when, surfing idly across the internet, I came across the late Denis Dutton’s article on “Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology” in the Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, an article which proposed the advantages of applying evolutionary theory to our inquiries regarding the arts and literature. This was the first time I had encountered Darwinism in such a context, and when I looked into the matter subsequently, I found that Dutton was by no means alone in his project; quite a body of literature had amassed by that point, purporting to offer evolutionary accounts of poetry, dance, and painting, among other things. Now I became alarmed, and greatly so. Literature (understood in the broad sense of learning, or letters) has been everything to me, the source of all my consolation, and all my self-understanding. To see it threatened by this dirty little creed, with its invariable tendency to degrade whatever comes under its purview, was deeply worrying to me. So I began writing against it, with that same defensive urgency that motivates a man to fight for kin and country.
Today, he asks me to contact my senators about gun violence. For one second, I thought I might ask my senators to do something about urban handgun violence committed by crims with already-illegally-owned weapons, but I quickly decided it wasn't worth the effort because they don't care about that.
They only care about my legal firearms. I don't think the crims bother with background checks. My senators are hopeless and it's not worth the trouble to write to them.
Brandon Smith put a lot of time into this post: Are Individuals The Property Of The Collective?
It's a fundamental issue, isn't it? One of the things that stunned De Toqueville was the abundance of voluntary affiliations and organizations in the US. Of course, The Collective doesn't do voluntary. I hate the very concept.
Acts 9:1-6, (7-20)
9:1 Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest
9:2 and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.
9:3 Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him.
9:4 He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"
9:5 He asked, "Who are you, Lord?" The reply came, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.
9:6 But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do."
9:7 The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one.
9:8 Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus.
9:9 For three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.
9:10 Now there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, "Ananias." He answered, "Here I am, Lord."
9:11 The Lord said to him, "Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying,
9:12 and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight."
9:13 But Ananias answered, "Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem;
9:14 and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name."
9:15 But the Lord said to him, "Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel;
9:16 I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name."
9:17 So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul and said, "Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit."
9:18 And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized,
9:19 and after taking some food, he regained his strength. For several days he was with the disciples in Damascus,
9:20 and immediately he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, "He is the Son of God."
More wonderful photos here.
Saturday, April 13. 2013
Gosnell might be the worst serial killer in history. (Excluding government people like Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, etc. The world of evil has two kinds of killers, the amateurs and the professionals.)
Good news: Women Now Empowered By Everything.
If gals get all of the empowerment, will there be any empowerment left for us guys?
Of course, it's not classic liberalism, but old-fashioned statism. An Entomologist's-Eye View of Predatory Liberalism:
Marriage -- or the sacralization of the male-female union -- is the foundation of civilization, so the left's attack on it is utterly predictable.
 We like to eat lots of those skinny French beans. We steam them in Costco-style bulk, and they last a week.
Mrs. BD likes to dress them with olive oil and a squeeze of lemon (which is the Italian way with vegetables), but I prefer olive oil and wine vinegar. And salt of course.
Add a little crumbled goat cheese or Feta cheese, some bacon, maybe a chopped tomato, and you can make a fine lunch out of them.
Many current economists think he extended it. It is relevant to today's economy, I think: Prager U: Did FDR End or Extend the Depression?
The Commencement-Speaker Litmus Test
Don’t forget parents share genes with their offspring
Yes, that's the problem
Another political change story
Why Liberals support Gun Control
State power
Billionaire Bloomberg Badgers Moms … Who Suck Baby Binkies?
Guy has gone crazy. Binkies are stupid, but is that his biggest problem?
Examining New York politics is like dipping a ladle into the sewer
For the past 200 years...but the vigor and ambition of the people outweighs the pond-scum pols
If he could
Indeed. But he used scissors so it's OK.
Most people I've seen in life on disability are perfectly capable of doing something useful. Blind paraplegics have jobs in America, as do people with Down Syndrome. Life on disability is life without dignity and self-respect. Same with Welfare.
How many people have noticed that there are virtually no Hispanic tech wizards in Silicon Valley?
 Sonnet 46
Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war
How to divide the conquest of thy sight;
Mine eye my heart thy picture's sight would bar,
My heart mine eye the freedom of that right.
My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie--
A closet never pierced with crystal eyes--
But the defendant doth that plea deny
And says in him thy fair appearance lies.
To 'cide this title is impanneled
A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart,
And by their verdict is determined
The clear eye's moiety and the dear heart's part:
As thus; mine eye's due is thy outward part,
And my heart's right thy inward love of heart.
I like the witty way he echoes the legal metaphor in the convoluted puzzle of words and ideas, which forces your brain to work to untangle it. Crafty guy, was he not? A way with words, too.
Name, and date of birth if possible, please.
This beauty was parked next to us in the Lincoln Center parking lot tonight. We went in with friends to see the Nederlands Dance Co. on one of their very rare visits to the US, at the David A. Koch Theater. All 3 performances were sold out, unsurprisingly, but we got lucky.
On the drive home, Mrs. BD delivered a fine exposition, on our demand, of what the intentions were of their new choreographer team (splaining that it was less about rhythm and more like talking in movement). Their 20-person troupe is remarkably skilled. Then the topic of Sophie Guillam somehow came up, so after that she waxed eloquent about Sophie Guillam's performance in Sleeping Beauty with the Royal Ballet, which she had taken a BD daughter to see in NYC a few years ago. Our daughter had said to her Mom in the lobby - "Mom - Look! There's a real Princess." Her Mom said "No, sweetie, somebody just dressed up for the opening," and then turned and looked and saw it was Princess Margaret dressed in princess clothes to the nines, jewels, tiara, and a long green gown with a couple of attendants and guards.
Daughter had just thrown a sun dress over her wet bathing suit, rushing from swim team practice, never having combed her wet hair. She certainly felt underdressed. It seems that was an immortal performance because Guillam could do things with Sleeping Beauty that nobody else alive could do. Guillam later switched to modern dance because she became bored with her mastery of Ballet technique and wanted new expressive challenges.
We had a nice seafood supper first at the Atlantic Grill down the street from Lincoln Center.
NYC is always a blast for us, a jolt of vitality, a change of pace.
Friday, April 12. 2013
I am a big fan of AA as a help with addiction and as a method for personal growth and maturity.
It's not the only way, but it might be the best way for those who have trouble with it. Recently, people have recommended two books by Allen Carr:
The Easy Way to Stop Drinking
Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking
It's been many years since we have bought either fresh or dried Thyme at the store. It's the easiest herb to grow in full sun and dry, lousy soil, and it comes back after hard freezes and cold winters. An advantage is that the leaves stay on the plant all winter, so you can just go out and scratch the snow off and harvest the sprigs you need. (I just throw the sprigs in with the leaves on, so my cooking often ends up with denuded Thyme sprigs in it.) Cooking with Thyme.
Another advantage is simply the smell it creates in a garden on a hot summer day. 4 or 5 small plants in the Spring will spread all over, only needing a little watering the first year to get started.
Thyme is the ultimate "savoury" flavor, but it's mild enough to make it difficult to over-use. I think it's basic to most stews and soups, Italian or otherwise. My chef friend uses it in muffins and biscuits, and on vegetables. She uses chopped Thyme blossoms on fruit cocktail. It has to be part of any bouquet garni.
Thyme comes in many varieties, some man-made and some wild. Most is Thymus vulgaris - common Thyme, with variants thereof. I assume it has Mediterranean origins. In the Massachusetts Berkshires, we have acres of Creeping Thyme as weeds in the less-fertile meadows, and my Mom always planted it between flagstones. Smells good in the summer when stepping on it, but watch out for the bees.
As a lady with refined sensibilities, Mom was always attentive to the small, charming details of life. There were always small vases of wildflowers around.
It's about nationalizing public education. Common Core: Nationalized State-Run Education.
That means to me that the feds want to politicize and control it. That's pretty much all the feds ever want to do, isn't it?
Best tabloid in Maine, with best headlines too: The Rumford Meteor
Thursday, April 11. 2013
 The Chippies arrived here today, up from their wintering grounds in the deep south. You don't need binoculars to identify a small sparrow sitting high in a pine tree, even if he is not delivering his territorial chipping call.
They breed throughout most of the US.
Ben Carson steps down as Hopkins commencement speaker.
A sad day when somebody can feel unwanted for believing that marriage is for a man and a woman. Of course, it's their loss, not his.
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