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.
Boswell to Dr. Johnson: My friend, Lord So And So from Edinburgh, has studied too deeply and aberrantly, has become a drinker, and has turned unfaithful (to the church).
Dr. Johnson: If he has drunk his way out of faith, he will in time drink his way back into it.
It depends on how obsessionally one wants to categorize mental states and attitudes, or whether one wants to categorize such words at all. I would certainly consider "desire" to be an emotion, as I would the crazy condition of being "in love." Those are wonderful kinds of insanity, but, however intense, tend to be fleeting when reality intrudes.
I think of "love" not as passion but as an enduring attitude of positive appreciation and attachment, with varying degrees of emotional dependency. Anyway, words are crude tools to apply to all of the ambiguities and ambivalences that relationships consist of. I just feel fortunate that there are so many people in my life who I want to hug when I see them.
It is fascinating how the intellectual elites of Jackson’s time had the same level of contempt for the common man as the arrogant ruling elite have for the “deplorables” inhabiting the towns and hamlets of flyover America today. Alexis de Tocqueville, a pretentious French intellectual, and contemporary of Andrew Jackson, treated Jackson, his presidency, and his supporters disdainfully in his book Democracy in America, written during Jackson’s presidency. The haughty condescension of the rich and powerful elite towards the plebs has spanned the ages, with the NYT, Washington Post and CNN scornfully filling the role of Tocqueville today.
In reality, the chief political “weakness” of conservatism—it is better to think of it as a challenge—is that modern Americans are conditioned to expect that government can solve all our problems, or must at least try to solve them. It is the lot of conservatives to resist solutions that are popular but barmy. Populism cannot change the fact that government is incapable of solving problems upstream of government—problems of culture and complexity that government amelioration efforts, however well-intentioned, often exacerbate.
When faced with suffering, we often ask a conventional question: “Why are some people poor?” But grinding material poverty was the norm for the vast majority of people through the vast majority of human history. Our ancestors had no concept that mass poverty was an acute social problem that cried out for remedies. Deprivation was simply the background condition for everyone.
In just the last few hundred years, that all changed for a few billion people. So the right question today is: “Why did whole parts of the world cease to be poor for the first time in history?” And further: “What can we do to share this ahistorical prosperity with more people?” Economics taught me that two billion of my brothers and sisters had escaped poverty in my own lifetime. This was a modern-day miracle. I had to find its source...
Maple sap begins to flow when there are sufficient daily temperature swings between below and above freezing. That tends to be towards late February-early March in New England, depending on latitude and the weather. Curiously, Sugar Maple sap does not just flow up from the roots - it flows both downwards from the branches and up the trunk, depending on the time of day and the whim of the tree.
Our Vermont friends have been busy getting ready for sugarin', so it's time for some info. We tend to think of Vermont maple syrup, but Canada is the major producer. We consume it abundantly in New England and do not approve of the cheap substitute goop in the supermarkets. We buy the real stuff by the gallon when we can, especially the Grades below Light Amber. You can buy the rather intense Grade B here, but I think I prefer the third level of Grade A - Dark Amber. This place sells all of the grades.
Grading - Many of of us like the intensity of the lower grades , but you won't find them in supermarkets. They are easy to find in Maple sugar country, though. About Maple sugar grades
$ - We pay retail in the $20s/gallon, but the farmers get between $2-$3/gallon, usually. More in a "bad" year.
When it looks like it has gone bad, it hasn't. Give it a light boil, skim it, and it's fine. Better yet, use it before any mold grows on the surface.
Besides on waffles, French Toast, and pancakes, what can you do with it?
- Put it on oatmeal like the Pilgrims did. - Pour some into winter squash halves with a pat of butter and bake, like my Indian ancestors probably did. - Drizzle some over fresh-fallen snow. Instant Maple popsicles with the power to pull out all of your fillings and crowns and to enrich your dentist. - Drizzle some over Pumpkin Pie. Wow. Tom taught us that. - Drizzle it over salmon, with some butter, before baking
Steven Hayward at Powerline blog discussed the Finnis Connection of nominated Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch. Judge Gorsuch took time off from his former law practice to earn a PhD at Oxford under John Finnis. Finnis is noted for his book about how natural law is central to jurispridence. This learning by Gorsuch may portend a renewed attention to the 9th Amendment to our Constitition, a key part of our Bill Of Rights all but ignored since the 1930s. The concept of natural rights reserved to the people is the core of this Amendment, and Gorsuch's learning in this concept may resurrect respect for our inalienable rights, as the Declaration of Independence phrased it.
I'm glad to see this potential, as I wrote about the 9th Amendment here in 2012:
Ancient Israel's National Anthem - The great song marking the Israelites’ safe crossing of the Sea of Reeds is the Hebrew Bible’s only full-length poem recited collectively by the people as a whole. What is it really about?
Thanks to Vanderleun. Somehow, I never knew this Tennyson poem. We all have regretful knowledge lacunae but we fight them daily. In sophomore (required) Public Speaking, part of that course was to memorize and recite a poem, an epic fragment (choice of Milton, Homer, Chaucer, Virgil, Hesiod, or Dante), or a Shakespeare soliloquy, each month. I have a few Shakespeare sonnets permanently in my hippocampus. Wish I had found this Tennyson then. The Sparks Notes re Ulysses.
Ulysses
It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honour’d of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains: but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus, To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,— Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil This labour, by slow prudence to make mild A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees Subdue them to the useful and the good. Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to my household gods, When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me— That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
You would think that a free society would give full expression to the intelligentsia’s virtues. Yet, somehow our own intelligentsia, lacking any serious need for moral courage, has managed to concentrate in itself the worst aspects of its Russian cousins: sanctimony without sacrifice; obsession with egalitarian social justice that “paralyzes the love of and interest in truth”; hatred of its own history and the confusion of that hatred with a “passionate ethical impulse”; an exaggerated sense of its own rights and entitlements; contempt for the views of ordinary people; a transparently false, pretentious pose of acting only on the basis of undisputed facts and disinterested principle. If in the Soviet case we see a servile intelligentsia crouching defensively against an all-powerful totalitarian police state, in the United States we see a different dynamic: a powerful, self-assured intelligentsia increasingly at odds with the workings of democracy.
My routine is to get a general physical (with big blood work, stress EKG with echo, etc) from my internist every four years, but this week I did it after 2 years because I was curious about the effects of my quite intense exercise program after 2 years of 4-6 days/wk.
He couldn't find any problems with me. He said my body fat was down to "athlete," that my fitness and endurance were far above average for my age and markedly improved from 2 years ago, that my heart was perfect, that my physique looked excellent for my age (Daddy Belly totally gone), that I should try to gain 5 more lbs by eating more (same thing my trainer keeps bugging me about but I don't like to eat much - I like to consume just enough to stop feeling hungry). Other than that, it was "Keep doing whatever you are doing."
He had me cut my BP meds in half. He wanted me to stay on the lipitor because my triglycerides had improved dramtically even though I was on the lipitor before, and were now perfect (I don't believe in that triglyceride stuff, but I want him to be happy).
He went over the details of my exercise program and told me that it was similar to his with a balance of weights, calis, and a little cardio, about 5hrs/wk total. He is fit as hell, 55 but looks like a powerful and athletic 40. However, he has been doing his program for many years. We estimate that I lost around 8 lbs. of pudge and gained about 10 lbs. of lean muscle in 2 years.
So it's been good for me from the medical angle, but that is not why I do it. I do it to maintain Fitness for Life. Any medical bonus is welcome.
(Also, he has some interesting ideas about the traumatic arthritis in my right shoulder. Wants me to see his pal at HSS if I feel like it. Just for fun, I got a tetanus booster, a Shingles vaccine, and a Pneumonia vaccine.)
This might be inspiring - I hope so. Have readers had a similar experience?
Six Plants and Animals 
How the 
Maple sap begins to flow when there are sufficient daily temperature swings between below and above freezing. That tends to be towards late February-early March in New England, depending on latitude and the weather. Curiously, Sugar Maple sap does not just flow up from the roots - it flows both downwards from the branches and up the trunk, depending on the time of day and the whim of the tree.
Grading - Many of of us like the intensity of the lower grades , but you won't find them in supermarkets. They are easy to find in Maple sugar country, though. 
Toons on top via Orwellian Happenings: Twitter Censors Trump,
Ulysses 
A reason to 