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 problem with growing fruit is that it all ripens at once. The reward is the emotional satisfaction of walking outside and harvesting with friends and family.
Canning etc is a foolish, uneconomic, messy, mindless, homey chore. We all do some of that anyway because it feels good and is a link to the past.
Peach trees to plant this fall (most trees prefer fall planting): Stark Bros.
I have to remember to prune the heck out of my peaches this late winter. My Seckel Pears are still too youthful to bear fruit. My fig shrub died last winter due to global cooling but they often can survive northern winters if wrapped in sheets of polyurethane or garbage bags.
One cool aspect of this production of the bawdy love, sex, and fantasy farce is that 5 actors play all of the roles - with no costumes. Thus the dreamlike confusion is created. No props, no set, so your imagination fills in the details like a dream.
The sober-minded (but rarely sober) Samuel Pepys saw the play in the early 1600s and thought it ridiculous. It is, sort-of, but it has had a long shelf life thus far for some reason.
The play within a play within a dream is so intentionally dumb that it's funny. Sheesh, the guy's plays were meant to be plain entertainment and not to be taken seriously. He just wanted to get rich by appealing to all levels of society and education from the Queen to the stable groom and he had a good enough grammar school education to do that. Once he got rich and maybe had his fill of girlfriends, he quit.
We had the usual fine post-matinee supper at what has become our favorite place in that neighborhood, The West Bank Cafe. The kids told us how much they enjoyed having seen - and met the author - of the clever musical Hamilton on Broadway. Since they are discerning and discriminating theater-goers, I'll listen to them. (That daughter is an ambitious playwright and script-writer. Actress too.)
I informed them that Hamilton's farmhouse still stands in far-uptown Manhattan. He used to ride his horse up the dirt road (an old Indian trail) Broadway to his farm on weekends.
Daughter informed me that she rides her new bike 30 miles/day to her various NYC activities and jobs, and is growing strong legs. I advised wearing a reflector vest because my kids are precious to me. Hamilton did not need one.
Mrs. BD overschedules me with social events and outings, but I man up and try to deal with it like a good, cheerful spouse: Happy wife, happy life.
My pic is the Pearl on the far west end of 42nd St. High-rise expensive housing is booming in that area and streets are full of happy-looking people of every size, shape, color, socioeconomic type, and ethnicity. What a city!
The late lamented Marianne Matthews - ex-NewYorker living in Houston - used to love my NYC posts. These days (except for Bulldog) I mostly get grouchy comments. I promise that if you spent a few days banging around the City with us you would change your tune.
Longstanding claims that stereotypes are inaccurate, in the face of an almost complete absence of data demonstrating inaccuracy. Indeed, stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most widely replicated effects in social psychology. One might think that a field plagued by a “replication crisis,” by tiny effect sizes, and by all sorts of threats to some of its most cherished conclusions would be singing to the world about one of the few large, robust, replicable findings in its vast literature. But if one keeps in mind the many ways in which political agendas influence and distort the field, one might not be surprised that many psychologists try to hush up, dismiss, or ignore such politically uncomfortable findings.
We consume a fair amount of ricotta in our house. It's a versatile substance, but I like it on good bread with a slice of tomato and some salt, or some jam or jelly.
Undaunted: Attended a charity event last night at which Dinesh D'Souza was the main speaker. A Christian social conservative, entertaining and forceful speaker. He noted that he has had a bumpy year or so (no kidding) and that he has a new documentary coming out next year. I liked him. I just don't get the big fuss about physician-assisted suicide. What's wrong with a little morphine to ease the dying?
Democratic
elites don’t seem to care much about equality - See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/democratic-elites-dont-seem-to-care-much-about-equality-sentences-to-ponder.html#sthash.CxM20UTA.dpuf
Says Moonbattery: "She has achieved exactly one thing in her life: marrying a dirtbag who constantly cheated on her but who thanks to Ross Perot was elected president."
"Since Slovakia is a Christian country, we cannot tolerate an influx of 300,000-400,000 Muslim immigrants who would like to start building mosques all over our land and trying to change the nature, culture and values of the state.... If we do not start telling the truth about migration, we will never move from this spot." — Prime Minister Robert Fico, Slovakia.
Many animals, like birds and reptiles, have a cloaca (or "vent" - hence the word "venting"), which combines urinary, defecatory and sexual functions. (Most birds copulate via a "cloacal kiss," but a few lucky birds, notably ducks, swans and ostriches, have penises.)
This reminds me of the Yeats:
Vl: Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
I met the Bishop on the road And much said he and I. 'Those breasts are flat and fallen now, Those veins must soon be dry; Live in a heavenly mansion, Not in some foul sty.'
'Fair and foul are near of kin, And fair needs foul,' I cried. 'My friends are gone, but that's a truth Nor grave nor bed denied, Learned in bodily lowliness And in the heart's pride.
'A woman can be proud and stiff When on love intent; But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.'
The problem with a powerful central government in the US is that it is a big place with many localities with highly-varying viewpoints on life and values. With all of our immigration and home-grown subcultures, and with divisive politics, the US has few shared values or foundational attitudes.
All we have is a bedraggled Constitution, and most Americans don't know what it says.
Thus the average American sees himself as a citizen of the US in the abstract, on national holidays, and in time of war, but lives life primarily as a citizen of a community, or communities, of some sorts.
As a New England Yankee myself of original heritage and thus with minimal respect and instinctive distrust for government, politicians, amd government power, I was led to this subject by the post about David Leff. He is a fellow who seems to be a pillar of his community.
Every community requires such people who jump in and participate in a positive way, with no personal advantage expected other than the rewards of positive involvement. It's been the American Way since de Toqueville described it so well. Other than the Founders, that Frenchie explained American Exceptionalism better than any American ever had.
I have written about the "Circles of Community" in which we all live, and their importance to a good life. Except for hermits, humans need that for pleasure and life enrichment if not for support and survival. Venn diagrams, circling around, with family circles, social circles, neighborhood circles, athletic circles, professional circles, club circles, civic circles, political circles, church circles, hobby circles, etc. Most circles end up overlapping. Much of life consists of these circles, but they do not happen by themselves. Somebody made them happen just as somebody organized the barn-raisings. Government did not do that.
However, I am just focusing on local community here. Big cities have local communities just as Mr. Leff has his little Collinsville.
JFK's famous inaugural line about "Ask not..." (who wrote that line for him?) can be better applied to one's local community and to one's circles of community than it can to this huge nation.
All localities, like all "circles," have energetic contributors, minor contributors, benign passive recipients, parasites, exploiters, and damagers of the social fabrics. It's probably a bell curve like everything else. Just paying your taxes does not count, nor does holding down an honest job or making some effort to obey the laws because those are the minimal expectations of residency anywhere.
What does count? Cub Scout Mom,Bible study, book club,Kiwanis, town meeting attendance or being on town committees, club committees, volunteering for virtuous or charitable purposes or at the library, organizing a block party or book club or softball games. It doesn't have to be big like being on the board of your local hospital or president of your country club, but if you are not engaged in positive ways without personal advantage, you are no capital "C" American Citizen in my bookbecause you are a free-rider. A resident, not a Citizen.
We all ask ourselves daily how we wish to live, what example we wish to set, how we wish to be known, and how we wish to be remembered. Every human has a gift or gifts to offer and it is sinful to withhold them.
Getting involved in the intolerance of intolerance racket is a political tar baby. Everybody gets mad and intolerant of each other. Meanwhile, the Asians just keep their noses to the grindstone.
Is she a Conservative or a Libertarian? Another general question - Why do the Repubs sound so hawkish re the ME? The US has no vital interests in that horrible, backward place.
Nick Cohen: Why I’ve finally given up on the left - Left-wing thought has shifted towards movements it would once have denounced as racist, imperialist and fascistic. It is insupportable.
The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent events in Syria and have therefore raised their security level from "Miffed" to "Peeved." Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to "Irritated" or even "A Bit Cross." The English have not been "A Bit Cross" since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from "Tiresome" to "A Bloody Nuisance." The last time the British issued a "Bloody Nuisance" warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada.
I had lunch with an interesting and delightful fellow the other day. David Leff. He was giving a talk about his last book, The Last Undiscovered Place:
When Leff began to look for a suitable place to raise a family, his criteria were familiar: an affordable fixer-upper with some historical character, pleasant neighbors, good schools, walkable streets, and attractive natural surroundings. The suburbs around Hartford were uninviting, so he settled sixteen miles away in Collinsville, a small village that grew up around―indeed was largely built by―The Collins Company, once the world’s leading maker of edge tools.
Mrs. BD loved the book.
His bio is here. He may not tinker with metal in the traditional Connecticut manner, but this guy is a serious historian of New England. Also, a lawyer, a published poet, professional art photographer, volunteer fireman, professional conservationist, Boy Scout counselor, chicken-raiser, and fly-fisherman. And more. He has a new book coming out this fall.
I greatly admire and enjoy people who invest themselves so fully and productively in life and in their communities.
Here's his website. "I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; . . . I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Re that Emerson, I embrace all of the above, not just the common. Emerson was posing there, I think. Anyway, Leff loves Emerson. I have tried Emerson many times, but he always eludes me.
Dr. Sacks published a piece in the New York Times called “Sabbath,” in which he wrote, “And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.”
Digital
pedometers and Swiss health insurance, a match made in heaven - See
more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/the-insurance-culture-that-is-swiss.html#sthash.14mVukEq.dpuf
At HeterodoxAcademy, our contributors have documented the near absence of political diversity in many fields, and we have demonstrated the damaging effects that this homogeneity has on scholarship in those fields. We are not the first to do so. Scholars have been calling attention to this problem for decades… and nothing has been done.
This time will be different. We have come together to pool resources, analyze current trends in the academy, discuss possible solutions, and advocate for policies and systemic changes that will increase viewpoint diversity in the academy and therefore improve the quality of work that the academy makes available to the public, and to policymakers.
Their free-thought manifesto sounds like the Berkeley Free Speech movement.
While the Federalists advocated for a strong central government, Jeffersonians argued for strong state and local governments and a weak federal government.
Self-sufficiency, self-government, and individual responsibility, were, in the Jeffersonian worldview, among the most important ideals that formed the basis of the American Revolution. In Jefferson's opinion, nothing that could feasibly be accomplished by individuals at the local level ought to be accomplished by the federal government. The federal government would concentrate its efforts solely on national and international projects. Jefferson's advocacy of limited government led to sharp disagreements with Federalist figures such as Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson felt that Hamilton favored plutocracy and the creation of a powerful aristocracy in the United States which would accumulate increasingly greater power until the political and social order of the United States became indistinguishable from those of the Old World.
"There could hardly be a more unbearable - and more irrational - world than one in which the most eminent specialists in each field were allowed to proceed unchecked with the realization of their ideals."
What’s baffling is the fact that even though I’m supposed to be a rude insensitive xenophobic intolerant racist dick, it would never occur to me to move to Africa, India, Mexico, or Asia and act with anything beyond respect, gratitude, and even caution. I certainly wouldn’t start running my neck about how the culture of my new host nation sucks and how it needs to be tossed into the dustbin of history and how the majority needs to quickly become a minority or justice will never be served. I simply can’t find it within myself to be that much of an asshole. And I certainly wouldn’t expect my new hosts to tolerate five seconds of such behavior.
And just think, Great Courses doesn't even have a football team, an endowment, a diversity coordinator, a Title lX administrator, a sustainability Czar, an admissions office, or a water feature. Any by issuing no diplomas they can make sure that you are there only to learn.
The problem with growing fruit is that it all ripens at once. The reward is the emotional satisfaction of walking outside and harvesting with friends and family. 
Took the kids to see 
We consume a fair amount of ricotta in our house. It's
The problem with a powerful central government in the US is that it is a big place with many localities with highly-varying viewpoints on life and values. With all of our immigration and home-grown subcultures, and with divisive politics, the US has few shared values or foundational attitudes.
8-Year-Olds Can’t Be Left Alone in British Columbia. No Exceptions.
I had lunch with an interesting and delightful fellow the other day. David Leff. He was giving a talk about his last book, 
Photo: Yesterday's Beauty Pageant.
Mystic Nights:
Photo of George Orwell's house via