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.
Sheesh. Climate change hits New England. 6 below zero F around here, frozen pipes. Amazing what global warming can do to us. A few years ago, Mrs. BD and I skiied at 10 below. That was zippy, and we had the whole place to ourselves, almost. Wonderful. I remember putting anti-freeze in the toilets.
The Poetics of life are much more persistent in their knocking at the door of your inner self than the Politics. Politics have their seasons, but the Poetics are our constant companions, waking and sleeping, thinking and dreaming. In a very real sense, since they run deeper than the Politics, the Poetics are the Politics' power source. But what are the Poetics about? Simply put, they are "like all Greek songs, about love and death."
...
I've stood in a room high above Central Park West where the only sound was a death rattle in an old man's throat, and told the doctor on the telephone that there was really no reason to send the emergency resuscitation crew for the twelfth time in half as many months. I sat quietly holding the old man's hand for around thirty minutes until his breathing stopped. Then I left that room, told my in-laws he was dead, and watched them mask their expressions of relief.
While American education goes further down the tubes, lame-brained notions are raised to levels of respectability in academe that should shock any halfway reasonable person. What has happened is the normalization of bad ideas, thanks mostly to identity politics. We constantly hear that we live in a hopelessly racist and sexist society, but the truth is that we live in such a liberal atmosphere that identity-based complaints are always taken seriously. And rarely does a student shouting obscenities at a professor or administrator get told to just “shut up and study.”
4:1 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness,
4:2 where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished.
4:3 The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread."
4:4 Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone.'"
4:5 Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world.
4:6 And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please.
4:7 If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours."
4:8 Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'"
4:9 Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here,
4:10 for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,'
4:11 and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'"
4:12 Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'"
4:13 When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.
Seems like lots of people believe Swany makes the best gloves and mittens for any temperatures, for any outdoor activities. Little kids do best with mittens, not gloves.
Honeybees (the kind of bee that was supposedly dying off, but was not) are not native to the New World. They are indeed an invasive species imported by American colonists from Europe for the honey. Most honey bee colonies are either commercial or backyard hives, but they often go wild until some bee-keeper tracks them down. Clover is their favorite food source. Sow your meadow with peerennial clover seed, and you will get them. I did.
Bumblebees, on the other hand, are more cold-tolerant and are native to the New World - and in fact to most of the world. They do not make much honey, and live in holes in the ground.
The Unexpected Breadth of Donald Trump's Appeal - In New Hampshire, he won working class men without college diplomas—and most every other demographic group.
Children need good, strong, reliable, honest, dutiful, demanding parents. It's that simple, and everybody in the world knows that. After that, it's just luck.
It is all almost unbelievable, except that it is the Clintons so nothing should be surprising. Normal people do not do life this way, even fantastically rich people like the Clintons.
According to McGuire, it’s widely believed among those in the
intelligence community that a typical employee “would already be behind
bars if [he or she] had apparently compromised sensitive information, as
reported.”
For the effort to make headway against the stories our rulers force-feed us, it has to be outside the script of our public life, but immediately comprehensible to a public educated by pop culture. And it has to be pushed forward by someone who can’t be shut up, and somehow occupies a bully pulpit that can’t be taken away from him. Basically, that means the champion has to be Donald Trump. He’s never been taken very seriously, but that only adds to his ability to say what he wants and to stretch the truth in support of the story he’s telling, and also makes it difficult for respectable people to respond to him effectively. And in any case, he has the incontrovertible authority that comes with loads of money and success in bringing off impressive projects. The effect of it all is that he can’t be ignored, shut up, or bought off, and if he insists that something is an issue that obviously should be an issue—like immigration or trade policy—he can’t be ignored. Those advantages may be enough to send him to the White House—especially in a country that chose Barack Obama, another man with a large ego backed by a compelling myth, but with far fewer accomplishments.
I think this guy is exactly right about cardio and endurance. 30-second heart rate peaks are the efficient way to go. He is right that all of those people doing routine, monotonous aerobics for 40 minutes are wasting their time.
Dr. Mercola is also good on muscle-maintenance, but has a bit too much emphasis on machines instead of free weight work. Our theory is that the machines are only to help us build up to more complex, multi-muscle group functional strength exercises we have listed in past posts. It's the latter that are most life-useful.
Overall, though, a good message. No pain, no gain.
"We have reached a point of diminishing returns in our public life. Hardly anything actually needs doing. We may in fact be past that point; not only does nothing much need doing, but we'd benefit if much of what has been done were to be undone."
Out of slavery, really. My rules on tipping in the US: Always tip restaurant staff, hotel cleaners daily, bartenders, bell boy, Dunkin Donuts people, garbage man and postman at Christmas, Stanley Steemer guys, outdoor helpers for special projects, barber, etc. In Europe, always tip hotel cleaners daily. They will be much more attentive.
The traditionalist rebel is the snake in the liberal Eden because he does not have faith in the noble motives of the bureaucratic activists who claim to be the gods of this Eden. He knows enough of human nature to reject the fallacy that the right ideology makes men so righteous that they can be trusted with absolute power without absolute corruption following in their wake. He knows that socialists have not risen above the crimes of selfish self interest that they condemn mankind for.
Maggie's Farm is sort of a Traditionalist Rebel site
Of all the subjects of academic study, psychology is probably the most useless, or at least the most useless by comparison with its pretensions to use. In a century and a half, it has not told us anything of undisputed value. It is subject to absurd fashions, and its published experiments, even when they are interesting, are often either not reproducible or their relevance to life is unclear. The overall cultural effect of psychology is negative, insofar as it tends to alienate people from their own direct experience and causes them to speak of themselves as if they were mere objects. They then attribute their actions to forces or things other than their own decisions, one of the popular explanatory forces or things at the moment being neurotransmitters. This is a boon to drug companies but not necessarily to the population as a whole.
... the peccadilloes of these two individuals, while not entirely beside the point, matter less than what their ascendancy tells us about the seismic changes that are transforming the American political landscape. The political and corporate elites that have ruled, unchallenged, since the end of World War II, and whose perspective is globalist, imperialist, and mercantilist, is facing a serious insurrection: the peasants with pitchforks are gathering in the shadow of the high castle, their torches illuminating the twilight of the West. Whether they succeed in penetrating the fortress and violating the inner sanctum matters less than the destructive effects of the battle itself. Does our ruling class have the will to fight and win? We’ll have the answer shortly.
How Oliver Sacks put a human face on the science of the mind - The world’s most famous neurologist believed that every patient had a story worth hearing.
Norman Doidge explores the legacy of Oliver Sacks, whose work and life remind us that humanity belongs at the heart of medicine.
A quote:
Oliver Sacks’s legacy was to restore a vision of a humane medicine that drew its power not from technological breakthroughs alone, but through the healing power of the doctor-patient relationship. It had roots in a more old-fashioned view that came in part from his general-practitioner father, who had close relationships with his patients and did frequent house calls. It was a form of care that required an almost unheard-of immersion in the lives of his patients by Dr. Sacks, which allowed him to draw portraits of human beings of an incomparable subtlety and sensitivity, while shedding new light on the mysteries of the brain. He also rejuvenated for us the rich tradition of the case history.
Yet Dr. Sacks’s triumph did not come immediately or without opposition.
“[W]ith little encouragement from my colleagues,” he wrote, “… I became a storyteller at a time when medical narrative was almost extinct. … It was a lonely but deeply satisfying, almost monkish existence that I was to lead for many years.”
It may sound a strange claim, but the detailed case history – which in the 19th century produced some of the finest descriptions of patients ever written – had all but disappeared from the neurology journals when Dr. Sacks started writing, and, even today, it is rare. The great 19th-century neurologists, lacking scans, EEGs, and statistics, perfected their observational skills and the art of talking to patients so as to help them describe how those patients’ mental experiences were altered by their brain problems.
With the advent of modern lab and scanning techniques, these observational and communicative skills atrophied. The journals changed, too. Detailed accounts of individual patients increasingly disappeared, replaced by group studies of “subjects,” described in more abstract, statistical terms, based on their scans and scores on tests. Instead of reporting what was unique about a patient, studies reported what was average about a population. And averages smear out what is unique about individuals.
Instead of joining one of our church's Lenten small groups this year, I plan to simply study this book as a daily discipline: Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches
It's as much an RC theological treatise as it is an historical/architectural text.
We're convinced it is the single most comprehensive strength exercise that exists, stressing every muscle in the posterior chain from your heels to your neck - but including your core and forearms too. The large number of muscles engaged is why it is so difficult and fatiguing when pushing the weight.
It's especially valuable for those over age 45.
I've heard people say that you can injure yourself doing them. Not at all, if done right. In fact, not doing deadlifts is more of an invitation to back problems, overall weakness, and sloppy posture. I hate doing them so much I call them Dreadlifts. (Mrs. BD loves the challenge of Deads, but I dread it.) When you hate an exercise, it tells you that you need it because YOU'RE WEAK. Happily, after 9 months I am approaching my final, realistic weight goal for Deads after which I will stay with that, trying to increase my reps. I do not have a weight-lifting physique - a runner's build - but I give it my all. The alternative is to get weaker and, eventually, frail with fragile bones. Postpone that.
Deadlift is not about building conspicuous muscle for the beach or for sleeveless dresses - it's about building and maintaining functionality and agility. It's really just "Picking things up off the floor."
(Fitness in middle age and beyond = Strength, Balance, Cardio, and General Endurance. Most efficient and simple exercises for the Strength component are Deads, Barbell squats, Pull-ups, Bench press, Rows, Planks, Push-Ups, maybe military presses too. Doing sets of those once a week, pushing towards realistic goals, will postpone physical frailty until some disease gets you. Pull-ups are my weakest, just not there yet, dammit. I am disgusted by any of my weaknesses, physical or mental. Mens sana in corpore sano.)
I read the article a couple of times and decided that I am not persuaded by that whole construct of moral foundations because the dimensions themselves seem so socio-culturally specific. Furthermore, politics is not about morality. Obviously.
What gloves do you wear when skiing below zero? 
Boy Does Something Special
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