Sunday, December 8. 2013
Matthew 3:1-12
3:1 In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming,
3:2 "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."
3:3 This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'"
3:4 Now John wore clothing of camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey.
3:5 Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan,
3:6 and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
3:7 But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?
3:8 Bear fruit worthy of repentance.
3:9 Do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.
3:10 Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
3:11 "I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.
3:12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."
Saturday, December 7. 2013
One of the many things missed by many so-called "cosmopolitan sophisticates" (actually self-absorbed reality avoiders) is that the deepest pleasures in life are in giving, not taking, and creating the appreciation for giving in our children.
We had a full day scheduled for today, as do most families on weekends. Each year for the past eight or so the boys and I have brought new toys to the breakfast at Camp Pendleton (about a half-hour north of us) paid for by Congressman Issa, whose foundation pays for many such charitable works throughout North County San Diego. We usually go at about 11AM but would need to go at 7:30AM in order to make it to Gavin's basketball game at 11AM. I asked Gavin if he wanted to skip the toy collection breakfast today, so he wouldn't be tired for the game due to the earlier wakeup. Gavin immediately replied, "But, then poor kids will not have as many toys for the Holidays." Out of the mouth of babes (actually a just a month short of 9-years old) comes the core wisdom we take pleasure is seeing in our children.
So, arriving early, Congressman Issa marveled at how both boys have grown over the years he has known them.
Then we joined another family with whom we've sat for the past 5-years, whose son Eugene also had a basketball game today, so they arrived early, and for the same reason -- to make sure that kids less fortunate had new toys for Christmas.
Off to basketball, Gavin arrived just as the game began, and his increasing skills were soon evident. (We practice together every chance we get, especially right now on strengthening his dribbling with his non-dominant hand.) (below) -
Continue reading "Giving"
Thanks for a good, fatiguing day in the field and plenty of good talk about serious matters. Glad I had the chance to test out my Grandpa's 16 ga. A-5. It seems to shoot straight. Heavy, though, after a few hours. This is how we roll in Yankeeland:
By the way, I know our readers always wondered what Woodcock "chalk" looks like. It's like a white splash on the fallen leaves. You have seen it in the woods, if observant. I took a photo:
I recently had a chat with my 4-Star Paris-trained chef friend about special creams. I learned a few things.
For starters, she said that Creme Fraiche and Sour Cream are culinarily identical, but you pay more if the label says Creme Fraiche which is only slightly lighter in weight. I already saved you a few bucks, because now you can put ordinary sour cream on your mixed-berry dessert.
Clotted Cream, or Devonshire Cream, is what you put on your scones and crumpets and strumpets. Excellent flavor on strumpets. Here's what it is. She said you can get it at Whole Foods, but I won't go there.
Good old Whipped Cream requires no comment.
Somewhat related -
- When I was a kid, Mom used to make Junket for dessert. I thought it was good, but nobody makes Junket anymore. (She made Jello dessert too with a squirt of Reddi-Whip, and Coffee Jello was my favorite.) Maybe some chef could spruce up Junket and bring it back into fashion.
- English Custard (Sauce). A classic for Bread Pudding, Plum Pudding, and other Brit puddings and desserts. Simple and delicious. Pour it on.
- Blancmange? I've never had it.
He wrote lots of poetry. This is a piece he wrote about the travails of painting the Sistine chapel ceiling:
I’ve already grown a goiter from this torture,
hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy
(or anywhere else where the stagnant water’s poison).
My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s
pointing at heaven, my brain’s crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy’s. My brush,
above me all the time, dribbles paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!
That is via Art Is Work. It Isn’t Theory. - Great masterpieces don't flow out without devotion and sacrifice.
Here's a fun essay: Was Michelangelo the first celebrity artist?
Probably was. Before the Renaissance, artists were artisans and nobody knew or cared who made the pretty pictures. Same with music too.
Friday, December 6. 2013
Heard the President on the radio this afternoon, and I didn't really listen to what he was talking about but I did notice his speech pattern and intonations. Here's my question: How does a guy raised by late-middle-aged, middle-class white people in Hawaii acquire southern American black speech patterns and intonations?
It has to be an affectation, doesn't it? Just curious, because we all expect phoniness and schtick from politicians.
A reader wonders whether he is doing Richard Pryor.
 One of the tastiest and most luxurious hors d'oeuvres is soft-boiled quail eggs with caviar. Eggs on eggs. It's really gotta be served with champagne. But how does the regular family afford enough Osetra caviar at $60/oz to be generous with it? They can't, because a minimal dose is about 1 oz. per person. We'll get to that in a minute.
Best way to eat fine caviar? Off those tiny caviar spoons with a shot of Russian vodka. Second best? On a blini. Third best? On a quail egg.
(By the way, if you have any left-over caviar, it's great on regular soft-boiled eggs or on top of an omelette the next day. It also freezes pretty well.)
Since I'm on the topic of caviar, a chef friend's favorite sandwich is a toasted bagel with creme fraiche (or the very heavy type of sour cream or, at worse, cream cheese) with a pile of caviar and a sweet onion.
The great caviars of the world are, of course, from the various varieties of Sturgeon. Today, sturgeon are farm-raised in some places (eg this French farm raised caviar). Yes, there are wild sturgeon in America (relatively endangered) and every once in a while somebody pulls a 16-footer out of the Hudson River.
Farm-raised American Sturgeon caviar ain't cheap. Let's take a look at the American non-Sturgeon caviars, those caviars for us plebs.
Cheapest is caviar from the roe of the Lake Whitefish. Whitefish Caviar is better than nothing, but it's basically low-rent supermarket caviar, around $10/oz.
Another cheap one is often marketed as American Pride. It's the roe of something they call a Golden Herring. I don't know what that fish is. 7 ounces for $50. Inexpensive enough to use in volume.
My third cheap one is often marketed simply as American Black Caviar. It's the roe of the Bowfin, a primitive cool-water fish of the US and Canada. Fishermen consider it to be an annoying trash fish:
Down Cajun way they call that Choupique. It can be got for $7/oz. Cheap enough to use on pasta as in this dynamite recipe.
Here's a stranger fish from which the roe is marketed: The American Paddlefish. It's a cousin of the sturgeon, lives in the Mississippi River drainages. Here's one plankton-feeding:
I've never had Paddlefish Caviar, but I'd like to try it. Wild American Paddlefish Caviar goes for around $30/oz. It's a shame that you can't squeeze the roe out of a fish and then let the fish go to make more.
Here's a little summary of American caviars.
CDC Report Finds ADHD Diagnosis, Treatment in Children and Adolescents Continue
to Rise
It's just a matter of degree. Shouldn't the government simply put Prozac and amphetamines into the water supplies? Historically, one of the selling points of Coke was the coke in the mix.
Higher Ed has gotten fat on student loans, and colleges have become more luxurious. Over-priced, over-marketed. It's a mess: The Student Loan Debacle: a Clear Moral Hazard
The Student Loan Debacle:
a Clear Moral Hazard
It's not a bad deal to be poor in America. Government benefits are almost endless, not to mention private charity. Everybody will try to give you money and stuff. American "poor" don't have to work, have big TVs, cars, and air-conditioning, EBT cards, food stamps, and subsidized housing. Good for them.
If feeling poor is appealing, there is a sure-fire way to accomplish that. Be single, have kids, and don't work. Don't get any religious sustenance, and don't learn how to do anything useful. Add a little substance abuse or jail tattoos to that or some body piercings, for maximum effect, and make sure you have no positive social network. In other words, don't build your life in a rational, civilized manner.
Even Mead gets it: Obama Flubs Inequality Message
Obama deliberately confuses effects with causes. That is not helpful to anybody.
Another: The greatest elevator of people from lower class to middle class life is an intact household.
As we posted this morning, it takes over $100,000 household income to be middle class in America today.
And as Mead said a while ago, A Consensus Is Forming on Marriage
Well, there is another way. What's the "poorest" village in America? Kiryas Joel. They are all on welfare. Happy. I believe many of them work off the books, too.
Rent control is a malignant residue of 1930s progressivism. Distortion of free markets hurts everybody except the greedy recipients. They vote self-interest.
New York, same as San Francisco.
Thursday, December 5. 2013
What can be more fun during Thanksgiving break than shooting a gun with family and friends? It can be the best time of year to get some target practice. I will usually grab my father-in-law and my boys and head out to a local range. This year, we didn't go. However, we typically visit family on Fire Island the following weekend, and they provided a surprise. Skeet shooting off the deck into the Great South Bay. 12 gauge pump actions and a 12 gauge over/under were the tools available.
Continue reading "Thankful For Our Guns"
Colleges Substitute Western Greats With Gender Studies
I hope parents aren't paying hard-earned money for this baloney. I have often advised parents here to monitor what their kids are spending your money on, and to have rules about what one is willing to pay for.
It's been repeatedly proven useless from an educational standpoint, but it's government baby-sitting and would use unionized, highly-educated employees, so what's not to like?
Get pre-K facts before investing billions
I love restaurants, especially NYC restaurants and bars. Eating at home is a bummer for everybody unless it's something special, or Thai take-out, but this is hilarious (h/t Althouse): The 44 worst people in every restaurant
Wednesday, December 4. 2013
 Oregon's Legislature is kicking around concepts that would make college free
I want free piano lessons and free painting lessons. Can I get that?
Related: The college-for-all model isn't working - After years of disfavor, vocational
education is being transformed for young people seeking jobs that
require more than high school but less than college.
The Maggie's Farm staff tends to believe in apprenticeships for almost everything that is work-related.
Story here. A quote:
“The American market for straightforward guides to etiquette dwarfs the British one. Even though large numbers of the British and especially the English are sticklers for etiquette, they pretend that such matters are either unworthy of discussion or in no need of it. Much more popular are guides that give them cynical or supercilious treatment. These reflect, wittily and sometimes not so wittily, on when it is a good idea to lie, how to navigate the hell of a second family, and the art of deflecting people who threaten to be tedious. It is a defining feature of English manners that they can be treated, simultaneously, as vitally important yet also comical. But then one could apply the very same terms to Englishness itself.”
 Hawkins begins his short post with these quotes:
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." -- C.S. Lewis
”One of the overriding points of Liberal Fascism is that all of the totalitarian ‘isms’ of the left commit the fallacy of the category error. They all want the state to be something it cannot be. They passionately believe the government can love you, that the state can be your God or your church or your tribe or your parent or your village or all of these things at once. Conservatives occasionally make this mistake, libertarians never do, liberals almost always do.” -- Jonah Goldberg
Leftists do dream of a utopia, a Garden of Eden where dreams come true and wants are met - according to their wants for us. They forget what messed up the Garden of Eden: humans. God felt lonely, but was disappointed by his creations. Real humans even rejected God's utopia because we have minds of our own.
Human nature continues to mess up utopian fantasies. Our Dr. Bliss has taught us countless times that utopian ideas are regressive, infantile fantasies, and that life is difficult and challenging. That's why we offer charity to the faint of heart and the terribly-damaged, so their families won't have to bear the burden alone and the government gets the credit (and the votes), thus taking over the role of America's magnificent and munificent tradition of private charity.
America is not designed for the faint-hearted, but the welfare state enables faint-heartedness and often, I see in my rambles in life, encourages it. Spends lots of taxpayer money, in fact, to encourage people to work the system. However, the vast majority of us are capable of, and desiring of, independence and accomplishment. We take pride in a "can do" attitude, and feel pity for those lacking in American vigor and uninterested in their opportunities which exceed those anywhere else on the planet except, maybe, Singapore.
Nobody can feel dignity without contributing to life, without being useful and productive. It's depressing and degrading not to contribute, even if you are getting free stuff. Why design an entire government-driven society around the few who cannot or will not negotiate life in an independent manner? Just give them money to survive, let them do what they will, and forget about them unless they break laws. It's not realistic to expect everybody to be a noble and honorable pillar of society.
Does "history" inevitably lead to serfdom to government? Are freebies and benevolent control and humble serfdom the future for America, under the dominion of our moral and intellectual superiors?
Here's the post by Hawkins, which mostly represents the Maggie's view of life: Why Liberalism Is On The Wrong Side Of History.
One quote:
Liberals dream of one day seeing all Americans permanently locked in the smothering, cradle-to-grave death grip of the nanny state. Nothing excites a liberal more than the idea of controlling where you go to school, regulating your work and play, deciding what type of health care you're going to have and then deciding when you get to retire and how much money you have when you do. Even if you want to choose, you can't. Even if you want to break free, you're stuck. You're not allowed to make different choices because liberals have made it illegal.
Why do they want this "for me"? Why do they want to control things? I hate it, and it was not what I was raised for. I was not raised to be a recipient of "services" or insane regulations designed by people who have never done my work. We the people are not stupid, and just want to be left alone. Trust me, Lefties: We can figure out what is best for ourselves, our families, and our communities. We're adults, proud citizens. We just ask for freedom from the heavy hand of intrusive government like the rebels in 1775.
Art: The Adam and Eve is by Cranach the Elder
 Image from How Much Trouble Are the Democrats In?
The Left Falls for a Revealing Poverty Hoax
Young Women Are Driving Record Firearm Sales
Obama: “We’re Not Going Back” …(To When 87% Were Happy With Their Health Care)
Arctic ice cap grows 29% in one year
I blame climate change
Nurse Practitioners Can Make Health Care Cheaper - And Doctors Want to Stop Them.
Doesn't matter: It's hospital costs that are the problem
Venezuela Goes Into the Car Business
Somali Muslim Who Raped Dead Swedish Woman Won’t Be Deported
Gotta give those Swedes credit for multicultural tolerance and sensitivity
Expert: Healthcare.gov Security Risks Even Worse After ‘Fix’
Muslim, Christian, Hindu and Buddhist musicians pay tribute to Bob Dylan in new
album “From Another World.”
How Western left-wing NGOs exacerbate the Israel-Palestine conflict
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50 Years After Vaccine Creation, 
Male 
Four Ways Katie Couric