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 Prof is hopelessly naive about human nature. In looking at human behavior, one must always be alert to the aggression and power-seeking. There is no sensitivity or hypersensitivity in these kids. They are manipulative bullies, "crybullies" as they are called. It has been stunning for me to watch real educated adults take these infantile tactics seriously or to be intimidated by them
Or perhaps they don't take them seriously, but are happy to find an excuse to do what they themselves wanted to do anyway. In any event, there is no innocence in the PC circus.
My response to that is that, if infantile or regressive behavior is rewarded, you will get more of it. That is regardless of age. If adult behavior is rewarded, you will get more of that. And as the man said, higher ed is not day-care.
Knowing others is wisdom; Knowing the self is enlightenment. Mastering others requires force; Mastering the self requires strength; He who knows he has enough is rich. Perseverance is a sign of will power. He who stays where he is endures. To die but not to perish is to be eternally present.
Phizzicle phitness consists of strength, endurance, and athleticism (plus body composition). A balanced fitness program will address all aspects.
Ordinary guys often tend to emphasize the strength component because it seems more rewarding, but if you have bulging biceps to impress the girls at the beach but can not sprint a mile or a half-mile, what good are you? Fact is, biceps are not very important in functional fitness. Triceps? More useful.
Ordinary gals tend to emphasize the cardio aspect but that is just as unbalanced. That's why we always say Weights + Cardio + Calisthenics (with sports counting as calisthenics unless it is TV football).
Today, more fun info re strength-building (for men and women).
- You can gain strength without dramatic growth in visible muscle size.
- An adult body can not grow new skeletal muscle cells. However, muscle cells can develop new and larger muscle fibers within the cells you were born with.
-Usable strength can only be increased by pushing, pulling, and carrying progressively heavy resistances (eg weights). Cardio and calisthenics do not generally build strength. Running one mile vs. 10 miles is not strength - it's endurance. Distance runners are often not very strong or powerful.
- Steroids work remarkably well to increase strength and size. Do not use them - go natural.
- After an initial phase of neuromuscular adaptation, strength improvement is discouragingly slow. Few good things come easily.
- Strength, endurance, and athleticism are rapidly lost without use. The older you are, the faster they disappear. Fitness is like money: Hard to get, easy to lose.
- Serious strength-building programs require a diet high in protein and fats, plus adequate carbs unless overweight. A good dose of protein immediately after a painful work-out is recommended.
- Strength building is a mind-body challenge. Very difficult and unpleasant unless you love pain and extreme effort. Most people prefer comfort - just look around at people. It's more fun with a trainer or a group so there is a relational aspect to it.
For strength-building for men and women, we recommend working one's way up over months or years to being able to condense a program down to multi-muscle exercises like bench press, deadlift, barbell squat, pull-up, rows, military press/inclined bench press. Together, those will stress pretty much every functional muscle group. That is my goal - a simple, basic, efficient strength regimen.
Nikil Saval at the NYT thinks it is. Like, I think, most people, I find it dehumanizing, cold, ugly, and intimidating just as its nickname implies. It says to me "You are entering Franz Kafka's nightmare."
That old Whitney Museum in NYC is just as hideous under its new name. It is unpleasant inside, too. I just figure that Bauhaus wasn't ugly or inhuman enough, so, to make a name for themselves, architects had to take ugly to its endpoint.
Philipp Meyer grew up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore, where he dropped out of high school and got a GED. After five years working as a bike mechanic and an orderly in a trauma center, he decided to attend college, getting into Cornell University at the age of 22. He graduated with a degree in English and he got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader. After paying off his student loans, he left Wall Street hoping write full time, but after several years of failure moved back to Baltimore and took jobs as an EMT and construction worker. In 2005 he received a fellowship from the University of Texas’s Michener Center for Writers. In 2009 he published his first novel American Rust, which won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was an Economist Book of the Year, a New York Times Notable Book, a Washington Post Book of the Year, and made numerous other “best-of” list. Meyer is a Guggenheim Fellow and one of the second generation of the New Yorker’s 20 best writers under 40. His second novel, The Son, is being published in fifteen languages. He lives mostly in Austin, Texas.
Google Analytics tells us that Maggie's Farm gets around 330,000 page views per month, and has around 45,000 regular readers (comparable to subscribers, with the others more like newsstand buyers). About 25% of our visitors are new visitors, which I think is good. Some will return. We do not count "hits" on the site anymore. Last I saw, hits ran into the millions, but I do not think that meant much.
The metrics are pretty solid for a boutique, middlebrow, eclectic, redneck, hobby website. For many reasons (including not being clever enough, and not having enough original material), we'll never be able to compete with the big dogs. It has to be good enough for us that some of the big dogs check in with us regularly.
By space, we have around 25-30% political material but since everything is politicized these days including Zumba workouts and reading Shakespeare, maybe it all is. Regardless, I wish we had more Lefty David Brooks types checking us out if only to see what the great unwashed might be thinking about. Actually, though, I am well-washed today and well-dressed too, having taken a long extremely hot shower after my deadlifts and pull-ups this morning.
I also wish we had more international readers. We have a share, but I thought we'd have more who are interested in some views of Yankee life.
Anyway, send our site around to people who might be interested. Our readership is our only reward.
Far more power than you need to find the keys you dropped in the dark. Designed for hunters, these are also good for spotting owls. You can temporarily blind a bad guy with it, too.
,,,instruction is the least important part of education. Most information is accessible from books and the media. Basic literacy and numeracy are important, but many if not most skills used by adults in daily life are picked up on the job. The main objective of education in every enduring society is to transmit authoritative cultural, political, and ethical traditions from one generation to the next. We can speak of the major purposes of education as the Four I’s: Initiation, Indoctrination, Inculcation, and Instruction.
The Montana Department of Employment, Division of Labor Standards claimed a small rancher was not paying proper wages to his help and sent an agent out to investigate him.
AGENT: I need a list of your employees and how much you pay them.
RANCHER: Well, there's my hired hand who's been with me for 3 years. I pay him $200 a week plus free room and board. Then there's the mentally challenged guy. He works about 18 hours every day and does about 90% of all the work around here. He makes about $60 per week, pays his own room and board, and I buy him a bottle of Jack Daniels every Saturday night so he can cope with life. He also sleeps with my wife occasionally.
AGENT: That's the guy I want to talk to - the mentally challenged one.
The period before the first presidential debate when Trump pulled close to a tie with Clinton feels like an eon ago. He had come back with a month of relative discipline beginning in mid-August that now looks like a parenthesis in an otherwise recklessly selfish campaign.
That Trump would become a poisonous wedge issue within the GOP was always a plausible worst-case scenario. Now, it is upon us.
Why did his decade-old locker-room talk matter? A cruder and raunchier America of Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé is now far more sexually sensitive than was the staid America of half a century ago — as if the dirtier we become, the more sanctimonious we end up. Past presidents, such as John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, trumped even Trump in unleashing their reckless libidos on quite young White House staffers, an array of mistresses, and random women. But they were then young, liberal, loved by the media, and skilled incumbent politicians holding the power of the country at key moments in history.
Watching one traitorous fink after another decry Trump’s locker room talk from a decade ago, I was reminded once again that these people were never on my side. It was always a con, a grift, to fool otherwise decent people into putting down their weapons and surrendering to the Left. Buckley-style conservatism, whatever it was, is now just a tool of the managerial class to clear the field for nation-wrecking policies to benefit the ruling elite at the expense of the middle class.
Last night, I was reminded of why Trump was able to obliterate the GOP field despite being out spent a million-to-one. He is not a pussy. Any other Republican faced with the dirty trick pulled on Friday would have gone into the debate prepared to grovel and plead, begging for a second chance. It is not all all inconceivable that he would have offered to step aside. Trump went into the debate prepared to deliver a counter bunch designed to knock the old fat cow on her ass.
The Spanish (Latino?) immigrants to the New World were just looking for the opportunity for a better life with free trade and open borders. (In NYC, Columbus Day is a celebration of Italian immigrants because Chris of course was Italiano. After all, without Columbus, there would be no tomatoes or peppers in Southern Italian cooking.)
Yes, our moral and intellectual superiors. Public servants. It reminds me of the old saying about Ma Bell, when she ran the US phone network: Why don't you care about me, the customer? Because we don't have to.
(Note to our non-American readers: today we celebrate Columbus Day in the USA. Had he sailed in the service of his homeland, the Republic of Genoa, the language of much of the New World would be Italian instead of Spanish. An interesting detail is that he never acknowledged that he had found a new continent.)
If Columbus had not carried some shoots of sugar cane from the Canary Islands to the West Indies on his second voyage, somebody else would have, eventually.
(Sugar cane, a grass, is native to some Pacific Islands, but it spread to India and then around the warm parts of the world. Sugar is good.)
The West Indies proved to be a good place to grow sugarcane. Once the natives were wiped out in hard labor on the Spanish and French cane plantations, importing slaves from Africa was economically sensible if morally indefensible. Thus began the slave trade to the New World and, eventually, the cane/molasses/rum/slave circuit.
We visited Columbus' nice house on Grand Canaria in Las Palmas last fall. By sailing ship, of all things. It is still a nice big handsome house.
Cane is still grown to some extent on the Canaries, and they are proud of their rum, Arehucas.
“I’m at the breaking point,” said Gretchen Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8,500 this year
“It’s not because I don’t like paying taxes,” said Gardner, who attended both meetings. “I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore. I’ll protest my appraisal notice, but that’s not enough. Someone needs to step in and address the big picture.”
As it stand now you’ve already shocked the world. Any additional garrulous speeches on women as sexual objects for men’s gratification is just more of the same at this point.
NARRATOR: Trump said Scandalous, Sexist, Repulsive Thing Number 1! AUDIENCE: Oh My God! That’s terrible! How could he have been nominated! NARRATOR: Trump said Scandalous, Sexist, Repulsive Thing Number 2! AUDIENCE: Oh dear! That’s pretty bad too. NARRATOR: Trump said Scandalous, Sexist, Repulsive Thing Number 3! AUDIENCE: Yes. We know. We get it. Wasn’t there something on The Weather Channel about a hurricane?
One of my Vietnam veteran buddies in North Carolina just sent me this email. It's worth sharing, to help recall what is important, and who. The charity which is linked is very well worth your attention, please.
"Once a year the charity for the crippled old ARVN vets still suffering in Viet Nam holds a dinner concert and fundraiser. (www.thevhf.org ) It was scheduled for this past Saturday evening and the MC and singers flew in from California on Friday for it. But then came the hurricane, which was supposed to mostly miss Raleigh..... but that forecast was just a bit off, and we got 9 inches of rain, very high winds, all kinds of flooding, trees down across roads, power outages all over. Including the rental hall for the party. And the official recommendations from the authorities were for people to stay home until it blew over.
"As I got ready to go in the early evening, my wife asked me why I would go, when it should be cancelled and there was no power at the hall. I told her that 1- the organizers had gotten a 10KW generator to run power as needed, and 2- these are people who went to sea in small leaky boats at great risk, or walked across Cambodia to get to camps in Thailand, or survived "re-education", and spent years in refugee camps to get here with nothing to start all over again in a strange new country. There was no way that rain and slick roads would mean anything worth stopping for to them!
"And sure enough, we had 90% attendance, even with people who had to drive long distances to get there. They had bought dozens of candles to light every table, the caterer (also Vietnamese) had brought sterno warming pans for all the hot food, ice for the drinks, etc. The power wasn't level enough in voltage for the sound equipment, but they brought in a piano and someone to play it for music, and the singers worked through all that.
"Starting first, with the star male singer, a superb baritone, singing the Star Spangled Banner a cappella. And there was NO ONE in this crowd sitting down, everyone was standing, hand over heart, and many sang along. In the flickering candlelight of the tables with the wind and rain drumming outside, it was something special. And OK, call me a sentimental, silly, old American.... but my eyes..... my eyes let me down, they spilled water down my cheeks as I tried to sing along through a throat tightened with emotion. And then they sang the old national anthem of South Viet Nam, and the whole crowd sang with strength and clarity. It was all something to experience.
"After which the show went on and everyone had a great, great time. I was very happy and proud to be there."
That is nonsense. There is nothing redeeming about acute and agitated psychosis. Indeed, we do not usually commit psychotic people to hospitals unless they present some sort of danger. The US is not the Soviet Union. In the US, there are many quietly psychotic people out there refusing treatment or help. That is a tragic thing, but it's a free country.
Another tragic fact is that our ability to treat schizophrenia is very limited. We can usually help with acute symptoms and provide various support systems if they are accepted, but we can not fix the disease, which is chronic. The good news is that we are now excellent at treating the psychoses of Bipolar Disorder. With cooperative patients, it's as close to a cure as is possible.
When the great Tao is forgotten, goodness and piety appear.
From the Tao Te Ching (as quoted in the Introduction to Stephen Mitchell's The Book of Job. Buy the book if only for his Introduction, then stay for his translation of Job. I've been through it twice.)
Phizzicle phitness consists of strength, endurance, and athleticism (plus body composition). A balanced fitness program will address all aspects. 
The next ‘oppression’ threat: Zumba classes
Bill McKibben is off the rails: 
Drone