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.
6:1 He left that place and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him.
6:2 On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, "Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands!
6:3 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?" And they took offense at him.
6:4 Then Jesus said to them, "Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house."
6:5 And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.
6:6 And he was amazed at their unbelief. Then he went about among the villages teaching.
6:7 He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits.
6:8 He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts;
6:9 but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics.
6:10 He said to them, "Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place.
6:11 If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them."
6:12 So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent.
6:13 They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them
I don't know about you, but I do not always know what I personally want beyond basic biological things. Of course, I also want to fulfill my life duties as matter of self-respect etc.
This weekend, I'd like to be in Wellfleet with all of my extended family (some below dragging out the kayaks), oysters, wine, maybe a little fishing and a little tennis. They also have a darn cute parade on the 4th. Little kids on little bikes decorated with flags, with a fire engine in front.
I have had to re-learn much of what I once was comfortable with about boat-handling. Midlife crisis issues, I guess.
Gotta keep learning or re-learning skills, or decay. I am blessed with many interests and hobbies, but am at best mediocre with all of them. Due to time spent, I am at my best at my day job.
- This craft is a deep-V single diesel Downeast-style thing, Maine-style, lobster-boat-style. Heavy. Pretty, I feel. Designed to go from place to place regardless of weather and not a toy boat.
- It's all about "feel". Each boat has her own handling qualities. Like a horse, you have to know it, learn how she responds to things, make her an extension of your brain and body. Takes me many, many hours to do this without causing a problem. Maybe more hours than I have left. Mrs. BD: "Aw, you'll get used to it. It's just bigger." Good, bold life attitude on her part.
- Boats steer by the stern. Turning left makes the stern turns right to reorient the vessel. Duh. I knew that. It makes the stern turn into the damn dock.
- A rudder does not work in reverse. Duh. Well, you can steer in reverse with an outboard or sterndrive, but otherwise, not really. Easiest to handle is twin engines because you can steer with the engines alone. I don't have that so I have to learn like the guys with their lobster boats. We actually wanted a twin diesel but could not find one we liked from up north even down to Texas. Boats are in short supply right now.
- Docking and mooring in wind is as much of a bitch as it ever was. Can I back this boat into a slip? No way, even without wind. Well, probably could on a calm lake but not on real water.
- When over age 45, scrambling around a slippery bow deck feels (is) treacherous. Gotta hold on to something.
- Winds and currents can mess up your best intentions.
- Checklists. Gotta use them for everything. It's tough to remember everything, which is why pilots use them. Very easy to forget to check the oil in the generator.
- Put a little bleach in the water tank, and a little water-softener in the head to keep it sweet.
- Nighttime boating? I am so past that, and there are idiots out there. Could include me I guess.
- I do love the chug of a diesel engine. They just want to work hard at 3000 rpm. Work makes them happy.
- New GPS. I have little problem plotting a course on a chart. Not used to GPS plotting, but I will get it after a while. Anyway, 90% of the challenge of boat handling is at docks and in harbors and marinas.
- The basic knots? It you knew them once, they will come back. But they should be automatic. Clove hitch, bowline...Darn.
- Dockhands? God bless 'em. When they are around at the fuel dock.
Berry claimed she'd been 'set up' by organizers who knew she would hate standing on the podium as the Star Spangled Banner played.
'I felt like they did it on purpose,' she moaned.
Really, Gwen?
You think the people running a huge and very complex logistical operation like the US Olympic trials during a global pandemic had nothing better to do than secretly plot to annoy you, the third best female performer at the Hammer?
God, the mind-blowing dismissive arrogance of this statement. No offence, but to borrow a line from Top Gun, methinks your ego's writing cheques your body can't cash.
I felt that the wonderful entymologist E.O. Wilson (the "Ant Man") got in over his head with scientism. Always liked him. I had a plastic ant farm as a kid and it was more interesting than an aquarium of bored little fish.
An edgy biography of Stephen Hawking has me reminiscing about science’s good old days. Or were they bad? I can’t decide. I’m talking about the 1990s, when scientific hubris ran rampant. As journalist Charles Seife recalls in Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity, Hawking and other physicists convinced us that they were on the verge of a “theory of everything” that would solve the riddle of existence. It would reveal why there is something rather than nothing, and why that something is the way it is.
In this column, I’ll look at an equally ambitious and closely related claim, that science will absorb other ways of seeing the world, including the arts, humanities and religion. Nonscientific modes of knowledge won’t necessarily vanish, but they will become consistent with science, our supreme source of truth. The most eloquent advocate of this perspective is biologist Edward Wilson, one of our greatest scientist-writers.
In his 1998 bestseller Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilson prophesies that science will soon yield such a compelling, complete theory of nature, including human nature, that “the humanities, ranging from philosophy and history to moral reasoning, comparative religion, and interpretation of the arts, will draw closer to the sciences and partly fuse with them.” Wilson calls this unification of knowledge “consilience,” an old-fashioned term for coming together or converging. Consilience will resolve our age-old identity crisis, helping us understand once and for all “who we are and why we are here,” as Wilson puts it...
He says "systemic racism" is a political narrative:
I am left wanting to know just what they are talking about when they say, “systemic racism.” Use of that phrase expresses a disposition. It calls me to solidarity while asking for fealty, for my affirmation of a system of belief. It frames the issue primarily in terms of anti-black bias. It is only one among many possible narratives about racial disparities, and often not the most compelling one.
I wish to offer here an alternative way of telling the story of persistent racial inequality which I call the “development narrative.” This account stresses patterns of behavior within the disadvantaged population that need to be considered. I speak now about African Americans, some 40 million people in the United States. This, of course, is a variegated, differentiated, and heterogeneous population. One size does not fit all. Nevertheless, I am willing to ask: do some behaviors observable in certain communities of color have the consequence of inhibiting the development of human potential among their members? And should such behavioral disparities be borne in mind when confronting and acting against the fact of racial inequality?
It's a lengthy piece so I'm sure he could not include every factoid, but I find it interesting, when considering these things, that the bourgeois black family in the US was stronger in the 1950s than today. I don't think "urban black dysfunction" existed then. Correct me if I am wrong.
This is not a follow-up to the post on cryptocurrencies, but it may as well be in some ways. When you consider the fact that only our government can print legal tender (Constitutionally true, but factually not exactly true, since lots of non-governmental resources are often used as 'money' - think stocks, bonds, mortgage swaps, etc.), placing your trust in anything the government does or provides is rather foolish. Markets survive on trust. Without trust, no market works. The legal and regulatory frameworks which underpin markets are useful and beneficial, but they change frequently (and sometimes not a little), so saying the markets survive because of them is not true - if anything, they survive because markets do need some small level of enforcement mechanisms to function efficiently.
At any rate, the reason I'm writing this is because of my most recent experience with government. Applying for unemployment. I've had my problems with the postal service (government run is a disaster which costs us billions a year in tax dollars that are wasted), Amtrak (government run money losing crap service), the DMV (no explanation necessary), and a host of other government services. So when I'm told "the government can provide..." I scoff. I reject unequivocally. Government is a failure on many levels, and the sooner we understand this the better, because government is not the solution. It's the problem. I ended my employment in February. I applied for unemployment, but was rejected (as I should have been) because of my severance payment. However, protocol requires certifying on the first eligible day. So I was to reapply in June, after the severance ran out. Which I did. And nothing happened. After a week, I checked in and found a hold on my account and a number to call. After 2 hours on the phone, during which I was transferred twice and then cut off, I finally reached a competent and friendly woman who did all the legwork needed, and took my number in case we were cut off, to determine that the state and completely botched management of my claim. It now turns out I'm owed back unemployment insurance because they misfiled my claim and as a result I lost out on 24 weeks of coverage that I was entitled to due to the pandemic. I should note, that once she'd solved all my issues, I was cut off a second time. Thankfully without a need to call back, though I should say hopefully.
At this point, I should note that in the 5 months I've been laid off, I've now spent 5 hours on the phone with NY State Unemployment trying to solve problems with my account. The idea is to get me back to work - and those are 5 hours I could have spent productively elsewhere...even searching for a job or replying to other inquiries I'd engaged.
One may be inclined to say "would you rather have the 5 hours back or solve the problem?" I'm inclined to reply I would prefer to not have had the problem and not wasted the 5 hours - which were not my fault, but due to a bureaucratic error on the part of some unknown official somewhere who hit the wrong processing button.
Errors happen. They happened even in private business, I remember enough that I had to fix at my old job. But the point is private business is far more accountable and I am willing to believe that there is a fraction of the errors or problems that I've experienced with government work, in private industry.
Unaccountable and faceless bureaucrats, or as my father-in-law likes to say "Assholes with a clipboard" cause more problems than they solve. If they didn't, the Soviet Union would still be around.
I know many who follow Maggie's may be unfamiliar, at best, or skeptical, at worst, of Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency. But there is a lot of promise in the technology, and the tokens (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.) are modern versions of 'value transmission' which are not unlike money. They represent the value of the technology.
So, to understand why cryptocurrencies are important, it may help to understand the technology. Here is a brief video which explains the tech behind the currencies. Not all blockchains are the same, that's an important thing to remember. Improvements are made almost every day on all the different kinds of blockchains, and their uses. It's my personal opinion that the next 'big' one may be Cardano, as it has solved many issues behind the concept of 'smart contracts'.
For what it's worth, if you've heard of NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) and still aren't clear what they are, the best way to think of them is that an NFT is a representation of a contract of ownership for a product.
Let's say I take a digital photo and I create it as an NFT, and you purchase that NFT. This is like purchasing any other work of art, but instead of getting a certificate which says you own it, you get the NFT. If anyone uses a representation of that NFT, you receive a payment for it. In a way, NFTs are a means by which trademarks and copyrights may be enforced more effectively (there are still issues with this, but they are being overcome).
So while NFTs are not cryptocurrencies, they operate within the cryptocurrency 'system' because they utilize the blockchain (and many utilize cryptocurrencies as a means of payment). While a currency is fungible - that is, it can be exchanged or used for a variety of different things - many things of value are not fungible (or at least easily fungible). You can use a currency to buy a loaf of bread, or instead of bread you can use it for soup, or a pack of gum. It's fungible because it can be used to purchase any substitutable product or service. A work of art is non-fungible because, well, you're not paying for a cup of coffee with that Degas print you purchased.
Legal lunacy: 
The Margaret Mead problem. 
The Solution To California’s Water Crisis