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.
Got some advice from my chef friend about Goulash. I have a lot of venison in the freezer, some tender cuts and some tough cuts. Tough cuts are for the goulash.
It's all about paprika. Very simple. Chef tells me real goulash has no tomato in it, and the meat should be falling apart. Like real chili, should be made with meat chunks, not ground meat. No noodles in the stew, but can serve on egg noodles or rice with some sour cream to top it off. This stew at the end should be thick, not soupy.
Recipe:
Brown a few onions in butter and veg oil - not chopped, just quartered, with some garlic Then brown chunks of tough meat in butter, after seasoning heavily with salt, pepper, and paprika Cover with chicken or beef broth and bake covered in oven for 2 hours or more. Then check it for moisture, add some broth or water if needed, check for salt, add more paprika. Can add some potato chunks if you want. Then back in the oven for another hour or 2. If too soupy, uncover and let it thicken in oven longer or cheat and stir in some thickener.
I guess crock pot would work, but it would need to cook a while at the end to thicken.
These Muslims are not looking to become German, even if that were a possibility. They are not seeking temporary shelter from a storm back home. The majority are men of military age, who should be back home fighting to make their country safe again. No, this is just a bunch of people looking for a better deal.
A debate about altruism, do-gooders, and people who are sure they are right: Beware systemic change. (Thank you, AVI)
I also look back at history and am deeply troubled by what I see. In the 1920s, nearly all the educated, intelligent, evidence-based, pro-science, future-oriented people agreed: the USSR was amazing. Shaw, Wells, Webb. They all thought Stalin was great and we needed a global communist revolution so we could be more like him. If you and I had been alive back then, we’d be having this same conversation, but it would end with both of us agreeing to donate everything we had to the Bolsheviks.
Problem is that people who think they are really smart enough to run things for others are often or usually wrong. Only humility grows wisdom, and vice versa. "Rational," "scientific" social planners have created far more misery, and far less freedom, than anybody else on earth.
At least until Wagner got his hands on it, opera was more like the pop music of the 19th century than its jazz. Serious People often thought about it the way they think about Broadway musicals today—there were a few good works in the old repertory, perhaps, but silly Disney movie makeovers developed for the mass out-of-town tourist audience are not the best respected art form around.
...
In 20th-century America, opera had something else going against it: As a “light” musical form that dealt heavily in emotionalism and spectacle, opera was something that women and gay men were passionate about—and that straight men were supposed to despise. The banker was supposed to snore through the opera that his social climbing wife forced him to attend; gay men, meanwhile, swooned over divas and worshipped at the shrine of Maria Callas. The one exception to the rule that straight men were anti-opera was for the true upper class elite, like Eustace Tilley and a handful of his peers. Loving opera was a sign of an aristocratic background and European tastes.
That’s a lot of baggage for an art form to carry, and it does great credit to the Met and the other American opera houses that opera has, if not exactly flourished, at least established a firm foothold in the United States.
Broadway musicals are opera. Often, "light opera" but still opera. Light opera and opera buffa have longer histories than grand opera. Indeed, Verdi was the pop music of his time. Shakespeare's plays were the hit tv shows of his time too.
Nothing can be more pop, or more delightful, than this. The spartan production highlights the music:
Bread and circuses for the proles? It's a strange article, from my viewpoint, but I understand that Denmark is a tribe of Danskers, all related. Quite alien to America or current American values. Perhaps child-like. I am certain that it was not written satirically. Where does this guy think that things and money come from?
Most hard workers I have known find dignity in work and do not find any work degrading or "commodifying." In fact, it is "getting free stuff" which is degrading and humilating. And what about the ambitious, the self-employed, the farmers, the self-sacrificing, the doers and makers and builders? Where do they fit in? How do you "give" a farmer or a doctor or a plumber or a writer a family leave or a six-week vacation?
I hope Americans do not aspire to bovine contentment, but instead to challenge, difficulty, and self-reliance. The only people happy to live on the dole, as I see it, are sociopaths and moochers taking advantage of their neighbors. OK, some deeply mentally-disturbed or profoundly brain-impaired people without families to care for them.
A like totally cool site, BirdCast, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
We take the fall and spring migrations for granted, but they are in fact miraculous feats and remarkable adaptations to the climate changes of the ice age era (which we are still in today - and have been for 2.6 million years with lulls and expansions of northern hemisphere ice. If you can apply "normal," this planet normally has no ice).
It is excruciating. The tone is professorial, patronizing, obnoxious, and unmanly. Obama challenged, and was followed by, Vladimir Putin. Putting the merits to one side, the contrast was not to Obama’s advantage.
Best
estimates are that American debt cannot be fixed with taxes on capital -
See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/best-estimates-are-that-american-debt-is-not-sustainable.html#sthash.mPDXxVzD.dpuf
Good cardio is about cardio-pulmonary endurance, muscle-maintenance, and slightly about burning fat (but only if on a carb-deprived diet). Intense cardio will not build any strength except maybe in your heart muscle, but everybody needs it to stay fully functional. Apparently non-intense cardio (swimming laps, walking) doesn't do much of anything.
20 minutes of this will do you good if it doesn't kill you.
In the article, Sanneh likens free speech advocates (like me, I assume) to "gun nuts," claims that campus speech codes have mostly been repealed (which is completely false), then bizarrely questions if people can believe in a diversity of belief. Those of us who are big fans of the concept of pluralism found the latter particularly mystifying.
Yesterday we popped into NYC, the greatest and most entertaining city in the world, to see a series of street theater events that were staged up on the High Line.
One part of what was cool about that was that, in NY, so many things are happening all the time that it's hard to tell the staged from the real. Not to mention that the city is an excellent stage set in itself and everybody on the thronging streets is interesting to look at. Bit part players on a giant stage.
Glad we parked in the burbs and took a train in. Took an Uber to Gansevoort. This week, we had the Pope, Obama, Putin, the tyrant of China and the whole UN General Assembly yesterday and again today. Thus, blocked streets, barricades, and cops making huge overtime everywhere. Not to mention the tourists. September is a big tourism month in NY, and rightly so.
I notice that nobody uses cameras anymore. Even the Japanese tourists, remarkably, just use their iPhones these days instead of their fancy Nikons. Fine cameras seem to be obsolete and nobody buys them anymore. Even the little Lumix I like to use seems kinda dorky, but I don't care.
The terminus of the High Line in the old meat-packing district, Gansevoort Street. I remember when this was a grim industrial neighborhood. Now the crowds and the new construction are astonishing:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, an important American figure who I find almost impossible to read, took a train out west partly to visit John Muir.
Emerson was Muir's hero. However, the elderly Emerson, the author of Nature, had no interest in going into the woods with Muir. I think nature was an idea for Emerson, not experienced outside of a park or a farm. For Muir, of course, wilderness was religion.
I'd rather be on a flight with an EMS person than with a Dermatologist. Every person should know how to do CPR. The tricky part is knowing when it is needed. If they stop breathing and turn blue, probably yes.
People do die on airplanes, but they probably would have died anyway. Interesting factoid: airplane air has 10% lower oxygen than the air on the ground.
He's right. Free markets are like a force of nature with sunny days, rainy days, and hurricanes. Government and politics seem to demand a response to demonstrate that they care, but how often does the response make things worse?
It sure does. It used to be done by wise old politicos in smoke-filled rooms, shrewd guys who really knew the people. Now it's up to the press, amateur and professional.
The US Army introduced fitness tests in 1943. They have relaxed their standards since.
When I began high school, every entering boy had to take the test while the coaches recorded. They were looking for athletic potential. If you didn't pass, you had to do a semester of remedial fitness before you could even do a (required) intramural sport - or even a JV sport. The remedial fitness was a bitch. 2 1/2 hours each afternoon. Ex-USMC math teacher was the coach. He made overweight kids go on diets and run extra unless they needed a JV fullback. Good stuff if you could handle a little humiliation. Runs, sprints, lifting, squats, football sleds, sit-up marathons, pushup marathons, etc. I flunked on the pull-ups. They also had a swim speed test which I handled easily but I didn't want the swim team. I still stink at pull-ups.
I doubt that a public school could make such demands on kids. Funny, as I reflect on it: We had riflery and shotgun teams too, but they were extracurriculars, did not count as sports. Still do, I am sure. Heck, even girls' summer camps have them today. A Bird Dog daughter was an NRA-certified riflery and archery coach/counselor at a girls' camp.
9:38 John said to him, "Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us."
9:39 But Jesus said, "Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.
9:40 Whoever is not against us is for us.
9:41 For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.
9:42 "If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.
9:43 If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.
9:45 And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell.
9:47 And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell,
9:48 where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.
9:49 "For everyone will be salted with fire.
9:50 Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another."
Hollywood Squares: These great questions and answers are from the days when ' Hollywood Squares' game show responses were spontaneous, not scripted, as they are now. Peter Marshall was the host asking the questions, of course...
Q.. Paul, what is a good reason for pounding meat? A. Paul Lynde: Loneliness!
Q . Do female frogs croak? A. Paul Lynde: If you hold their little heads under water long enough.
Q. If you're going to make a parachute jump, at least how high should you be? A. Charley Weaver: Three days of steady drinking should do it.
Q. True or False, a pea can last as long as 5,000 years. A. George Gobel: Boy, it sure seems that way sometimes.
Q. You've been having trouble going to sleep. Are you probably a man or a woman? A.. Don Knotts: That's what's been keeping me awake.
Q. According to Cosmopolitan, if you meet a stranger at a party and you think that he is attractive, is it okay to come out and ask him if he's married? A.. Rose Marie: No, wait until morning.
Normal Americans would never even consider these sorts of scams. Even normal sleazy and corrupt politicians:
These email summaries show that the Clinton Foundation was the State Department and the State Department was the Clinton Foundation. All one, big, seamless, Clinton-promoting entity. We would know far more if State released the full emails. It is citing personal privacy as one reason not to make some public. In others, it claims the emails “shed no light on the conduct of U.S. Government business.”
I am waiting for The Donald to label the Clintons as grifters. Somebody needs to say the obvious.
Among the islanders, signing was considered a life skill, like knowing how to fish, more than a formal language to be taught. “It was passed on to kids as part of, ‘Here’s the stuff you need to know to make a living in this corner of the world,’” Van Riper said. Children picked it up from their parents; no records indicate that it was ever taught in schools.
Got some advice from my chef friend about Goulash. I have a lot of venison in the freezer, some tender cuts and some tough cuts. Tough cuts are for the goulash.
Is empathy 
Why is the welfare state under attack when 
A like totally cool site,
Toon via 
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Seattle-area school