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.
Dr. Lawrence M. Principe is Drew Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Professor Principe earned a B.S. in Chemistry and a B.A. in Liberal Studies from the University of Delaware. He also holds two doctorates: a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Johns Hopkins University. In 1999, the Carnegie Foundation chose Professor Principe as the Maryland Professor of the Year, and in 1998 he received the Templeton Foundation's award for courses dealing with science and religion. Johns Hopkins has repeatedly recognized Professor Principe's teaching achievements. He has won its Distinguished Faculty Award, the Excellence in Teaching Award, and the George Owen Teaching Award. In 2004, Professor Principe was awarded the first Francis Bacon Prize by the California Institute of Technology, awarded to an outstanding scholar whose work has had substantial impact on the history of science, the history of technology, or historically-engaged philosophy of science. Professor Principe has published numerous papers and is the author or coauthor of three books, including The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest.
I'm impressed. He is a young fellow too. With 20+ more IQ points, I could have enjoyed his stellar career.
Photo: It's a dumb holiday, meaningless. Drinking until midnight with a silly hat on no longer appeals to me. Never did, really. Furthermore, I am meeting my trainer at our little gym at 5 tomorrow am to get the year started on the right foot. And champagne gives me heartburn.
I’m
not convinced women who are on Tinder who say “no hookups” actually
mean that. - See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/12/ninjaeconomics-on-tinder-from-the-comments.html#sthash.D8NZrvy2.dpuf
Building strength, power, and endurance are our goals (along with minimizing disgusting body fat) until we reach a point of satisfaction and can move into fitness-maintenance. The "Body-building" is not a goal per se, but some of that accompanies strength improvement. Vigor and "functional fitness."
I did heavy weights this morning. It is so damn difficult mentally and physically. On several sets I reached muscle failure and pain before meeting my boss' expected goals du jour. There is no way for an amateur to do weight work without a trainer (need a spotter, a constant technique-correcter, and somebody to push you harder and to raise the weights each week). He said "Good, we're breaking down those muscles, tearing those fibers." Indeed. Body feels like jello.
A little liquid carb and protein are supposedly good after heavy weights - and an Advil: Why Bother With Recovery Drinks? I need to do that, but one salted hard-boiled egg is all I can handle in the morning on a normal day. Carbs feel revolting to me before 6 pm unless I am in a diner with a friend. Part of my problem is that I do not really like food very much, however elegant and fancy. It just doesn't do much for me or my soul. Just makes me tired.
"Recovery" time and nutrition do not apply to cardio (aerobic) exercise and conditioning, only to heavy resistance efforts where it can take 3-5 days for recovery and reconstruction of a given muscle group. We only do dead lifts once a week, for example, but we push it to the max - to the point when one asks "Why the hell am I here doing this when I could be in bed instead of lifting this f-ing Volkswagen only to put it down again at 5 a.m.?"
It is interesting to learn that cardio exercises (aerobics), over time, can reduce muscle size and power. Cardio training and strength training do not mix well, in fact, because the body responds to them differently: Controlling Muscle Breakdown
Still, most of us white-collar, sedentary fitness-seekers want improvement in all areas so we have to do the best we can with them. Push them all and hope for the best. If we were peasants in the fields, we'd be in better shape. Over the next four or five months I hope to build towards a simplified work-out of multi-muscle-group exercises: Dead lifts, bench press, chin ups, pull-ups, rows, barbell squats, step-ups with military presses, planks. That will have taken one year in May 2016 to maybe reduce my wonderful trainer from 3 to 1 or 2 days/week.
That, plus combos of jump (speed) rope, stair machine, elliptical, treadmill for the cardio part on my "off" days. In total, moving with maximum exertion and intention 40-60 minutes per day, 5-6 days/week for the indefinite future. I gave myself 12 months to get into half-decent condition for my age, and have approached it with total dedication despite my lazy-ass body yelling "Stop! I don't feel like doing this!"
"I don't feel like it" is the death of decadent Western Civilization and of the human spirit. It is spirit-less. So is gluttony, and all of the other deadly sins. I think Character, like muscle strength, is built through pure, ungratifying, unpleasant effort. I have almost always done my best with that. On occasion, not - to my endless shame.
To look at me with clothes on, no difference is noticeable except for better posture and slight bulging in the shoulders of my old suits. I was never in bad shape, but was beginning to lose fitness and energy over time and to create a small paunch. I am glad to see that some of my pals are getting on board with this pursuit of the fountain of youth.
(At some point in the future, Crossfit (the regular, not the competitive version) might be a good addition to a maintenance work-out program, and more fun with a cohesive random group and lots of exercise variety. Their programs seem to push you to your personal max, whether you are fat or a 95-lb hollow-chested weakling, 18 years old or 80 years old, an athlete or a heart-attack survivor or stroke patient.)
In November, “intersectional feminist” Rachel Kuo instructed the unthinking white masses on the preconditions of ordering takeaway from any “ethnic” restaurant. A list that includes being intimately acquainted with regional politics, colonial history, and issues of “labour equity and immigration policy” – all before ordering that hot tossed chicken and sticky rice. Meanwhile, the Guardian’s Osman Faruqi, a “Sydney-based writer and activist,” demanded that someone else – taxpayers on the other side of the world – should pay for his leisure activities. Specifically, by nationalising Twitter. Mr Faruqi was subsequently astonished to hear that many readers had assumed his article was a cunning satire of leftist entitlement. Apparently, this failure to appreciate his seriousness and insight merely “shows how right-wing our political debate has become.”
"The postcrisis perception, at least in the media, appears to be one of Americans being held down by Wall Street, by big companies in the private sector, and by the wealthy. Capitalism is on trial. I see it a little differently. If a lender offers me free money, I do not have to take it. And if I take it, I better understand all the terms, because there is no such thing as free money. That is just basic personal responsibility and common sense. The enablers for this crisis were varied, and it starts not with the bank but with decisions by individuals to borrow to finance a better life, and that is one very loaded decision. This crisis was such a bona fide 100-year flood that the entire world is still trying to dig out of the mud seven years later. Yet so few took responsibility for having any part in it, and the reason is simple: All these people found others to blame, and to that extent, an unhelpful narrative was created. Whether it’s the one percent or hedge funds or Wall Street, I do not think society is well served by failing to encourage every last American to look within. This crisis truly took a village, and most of the villagers themselves are not without some personal responsibility for the circumstances in which they found themselves. We should be teaching our kids to be better citizens through personal responsibility, not by the example of blame."
“Social justice” was purportedly a new addition to the classical legal, distributive, and commutative justice ideas found in Aristotle. It was rather connected with the Leviathan state. Social justice was based on the idea that what is “due” to people for their flourishing is what decides their good. It was not personal virtue that was at the center of moral and political life. Social and political “structures” determined virtue and vice.
So the “vocation” to “social justice” derived its nobility from “service” to the poor and down-trodden through promises to “re-structure” the state or economy. Oftentimes this renovation of society was promoted in revolutionary terms, because state and social “structures” determined the meaning of virtue and vice. “Social justice” always hovered in the shadow of totalitarianism. The state became the center of all human life. Social Justice received its self-justification from what it distributed to everyone.
I am not sure why it is a mystery. Everything decays, wears out. Entropy is like gravity, and I doubt that humans in a natural environment were ever designed to live much past child-producing years (knees, ovaries, penile weakness, heart valves, loss of collagen, cancers, etc,). But we do, now. Most of us.
"The government can not only evoke fear in its victims; it can also evoke a sort of superstitious reverence. It is thus both an army and a church, and with sharp weapons in both hands it is virtually irresistible. Its personnel, true enough, may be changed, and so may the external forms of the fraud it practices, but its inner nature is immutable."
Behind a pencil stand millions of cooperating people, but no mastermind. Which is why worshipers in the church of government, the source of top-down authority, disparage a free society’s genius for spontaneous order: It limits the importance of government and other supposed possessors of the expertise that supposedly is essential for imposing order from above.
George is so old-fashioned. People just want more free "services" to make life easier.
Most sermons I hear are pretty good. Some are more on the intellectual, apologist side; some more spirit-soaked and uplifting. All good, but all mainly addressed to the converted. (In my view, to become a capital-C Christian one must become a convert regardless of how raised. Some term it "re-born," which is an ok term.)
Jesus didn’t come because humans had somehow missed the point of moral teaching and needed to be set right on a few points and given some inspirational coaching. He didn’t come to do TED talks. He came, the gospel writers believed, because history revealed the failure of the ‘moral approach’ to the problem of evil, and God decided that something more and something different needed to be done.
I recommend it especially to non-Christians and to the Christ-curious, but it refreshed my mind in a good way too.
I found the movie tedious. In addition, it ignored obvious factors which were crucial to the story:
For starters, everybody knew there was a US housing bubble and a mortgage bubble. Dr. Burry was not the only one, but the credit default swaps was a brilliant approach to shorting what was bound to fall sooner or later.
Everybody knew that a large number of mortgages were junk. You could read about it on the internets every day.
Everybody knew that, since Clinton, banks were required to expand mortgage availability to high credit risks. This was not voluntary.
Naturally, banks did not want to keep that junk on their books. They packaged them and sold them to sophisticated willing institutional buyers around the world, same as any other asset a bank did not wish to hold. Can't blame the bankers for doing that. It's their job to sell stuff. It's common sense.
One good thing was included: the slipperiness of the debt rating agencies.
Everybody likes to find a scapegoat. Moral of the story, in my view: Bubbles happen, and always burst. Shorting bubbles makes sense. It just takes balls. Other morals: Abolish Freddie Mac And Fannie Mae - and the Fed. And the notion of "too big to fail."
How silently, how silently, The wondrous Gift is giv'n! So God imparts to human hearts The blessings of His heaven. No ear may hear His coming, But in this world of sin, Where meek souls will receive Him still, The dear Christ enters in.
'A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.' And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, And the silken girls bringing sherbet. Then the camel men cursing and grumbling And running away, and wanting their liquor and women, And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly And the villages dirty and charging high prices: A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation; With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, And three trees on the low sky, And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel, Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver, And feet kicking the empty wine-skins. But there was no information, and so we continued And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.
It's very easy to look ahead and expect the worst. We could enter 2016 with low expectations. There are plenty of negative trends going on in the world. When aren't there negative trends? I can't remember a single year where life was rosy, bright and promising without a hint of clouds. Some of the less encouraging new years I remember were 2000 (that nasty Y2K bug which did so much damage), 1980 (Iranian hostages and an election...the Winter Olympic Miracle on Ice was still to come), 1988 (after the market crash, people were very uptight) and 2009 (again a market crash, the mortgage meltdown and the election of a president bent on dividing the nation as he claimed to unify it). Even in these years, there were many positives which were overlooked. Needless to say, we passed through all those years without seeing everything fall to pieces.
Which isn't to say some things haven't gotten worse. If all we do is focus on what's worse, though, it is hard to see how life gotten better. Yet it has. Hans Rosling spends much time discussing this (and his videos are always worth posting again):
2016 won't be sweetness and light, the news lately has had plenty of negativity. ISIS and the growth of fascism driven by Islamic radicals, Bernie Sanders and socialist wonderland driven by his belief in mythological theories which have been discredited time and again, an overbought stock market fueled by easy money, a dollar that is the prettiest horse in the glue factory, a Fed which is raising rates because it has no choice after keeping them low too long. There's plenty of bad out there to worry about.
2016 could still be pretty good. We may worry the so-called recovery is likely to end badly, though I hesitate to say it will be in 2016. It could've, and should've, ended many times in the past 6 years. But since it isn't a real recovery, more of a muddling along, maybe there hasn't been anything to 'end'. Even though it's been a pale 'recovery', plenty of good events have occurred.
The 
Photo: 55 Plus MPH: 
Most sermons I hear are pretty good. Some are more on the intellectual, apologist side; some more spirit-soaked and uplifting. All good, but all mainly addressed to the converted. (In my view, to become a capital-C Christian one must become a convert regardless of how raised. Some term it "re-born," which is an ok term.)
Christmas Eve in the Ardennes 1944
Psalm 148
"I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you."