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.
The study called into question America’s educational credentialing system. While few American test-takers lacked a high school degree, the United States didn’t perform any better than countries with relatively high rates of failing to finish high school. And our college graduates didn’t perform well, either.
Thomas may have played the part of the doomed poet, excused by his genius from following the conventions of decent behavior. But he was a genius: few are the twentieth-century English poets who wrote lines that not only were memorable but that also make the soul vibrate. Thomas was one of them.
Thomas was aware from an early age of his own genius. In his book of marvelously evocative stories about his childhood and adolescence, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, published in 1940, when he was 26, Thomas recalls reciting a poem he had written 12 years earlier, in which the lines appear:
The frost has known, From scattered conclave by the few winds blown, That the lone genius in my roots, Bare down there in a jungle of fruits, Has planted a green year, for praise, in the heart of my upgrowing days.
"The picture of science and religion at each other’s throats persists in mainstream media and scholarly journals, but each chapter in Galileo Goes to Jail shows how much we have to gain by seeing beyond the myths."
1:18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
1:19 For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart."
1:20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
1:21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.
1:22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom,
1:23 but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,
1:24 but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
1:25 For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.
Wiki: ″The Nymph′s Reply to the Shepherd″ (1596), by Sir Walter Raleigh, is a poem that responds to ″The Passionate Shepherd to His Love″ by Christopher Marlowe (published in 1599) wherein the courted nymph presents her rejection of the shepherd's invitation to pastoral life as perpetual idyll. We posted that Marlow poem a couple of weeks ago here.
The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
If all the world and love were young, And truth in every shepherd's tongue, These pretty pleasures might me move To live with thee and be thy love.
Time drives the flocks from field to fold When rivers rage and rocks grow cold, And Philomel becometh dumb; The rest complains of cares to come.
The flowers do fade, and wanton fields To wayward winter reckoning yields; A honey tongue, a heart of gall, Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall,
Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses, Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten-- In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
Thy belt of straw and ivy buds, Thy coral clasps and amber studs, All these in me no means can move To come to thee and be thy love.
But could youth last and love still breed, Had joys no date nor age no need, Then these delights my mind might move To live with thee and be thy love.
Avoidable and preventable are two of the most capacious words in the medical lexicon. They can’t be unproven. They have propped up industries. The public has consented to healthism, implicitly. Because one person’s avoidable is another person’s overdiagnosis.
“I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he would later write in his memoir Chronicles.
You have to feel a little sorry these days for professors married to their former students. They used to be respectable citizens—leaders in their fields, department chairs, maybe even a dean or two—and now they’re abusers of power avant la lettre.
Who Wants to Live in Detroit? Four decades after 'white flight' began, tens of thousands of African-Americans have now left as well. What does that mean for the city's future?
Racism! Patriarchy! Sexism! Rape on campus! Christianity's bigotry! The reactionary average American! Republicans' hate speech and hate thought! US history, a litany of racism and oppression! All the founding fathers, hypocritical sonzabitches! All our ancestors, imperialist mongrels! Oppression of women, and gays, and transgenders!
(The only person, the only people, who come out positive in this (self-serving) world view are — surprise, surprise — the drama queens themselves! Also known as the wise men, and the wise women, arriving as knights in shining armor on their white steeds to fight for the victims and the martyrs of the world.)
Ginsberg and Breyer care more about leftist policy than about the Constitution. They are rather open about that, but it's not their job. Thus I have no respect for them.
Welcome but rare - a day without snow tomorrow. But it's snowing now, and will be 6 degrees F tonite. In Yankeeland, it just doesn't quit. Cold, too. I heard a lady on the radio today explaining how the cold and snow are proof of global warming. I won't complain, but we're running out of places to pile the snow. Lovely especially when falling hard and you have a fireplace and central heat indoors. Maybe I am nuts, but I love a good winter. I hate wimpy winters even though we must all pray for global warming for the long-term benefit of humanity.
Hard Feelings: Science’s Struggle to Define Emotions - While it's possible for researchers to study facial expressions, brain patterns, behavior, and more, each of these is only part of a more elusive whole:
Around the mid-18th century or so, Dixon writes, these passions and affections were lumped together under the umbrella of emotion. In the early 19th century, Scottish philosopher Thomas Brown was the first to propose emotion as a theoretical category, opening the door for scientific research. But though he was eager to study it, Brown couldn’t define it.
“The exact meaning of the term emotion, it is difficult to state in any form of words,” Brown said in a lecture. And so it has remained.
“The only thing certain in the emotion field is that no one agrees on how to define emotion,” Alan Fridlund, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote to me.
"Emotion" is sort-of an artificial construct, is it not? It - whatever it is - can rarely be separated from cognition, perception, ideas, and all other mental processes and biological instincts. We easily can identify, in ourselves, lustful desire ("urge to merge"), rage, despair, joy, fear and anxiety - but these extremes are rare and still more expressible by poets and musicians than by scientists.
Pic from a reader in Yankeeland this week 
Wiki: ″The Nymph′s Reply to the Shepherd″ (1596), by Sir Walter Raleigh, is a poem that responds to ″The Passionate Shepherd to His Love″ by Christopher Marlowe (published in 1599) wherein the courted nymph presents her rejection of the shepherd's invitation to pastoral life as perpetual idyll. We posted that Marlow poem a couple of weeks ago
From 
Home for Purim - 
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