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.
Mrs. BD's Father's Day "present" to me was a trip to her fancy hair salon to get me an updated hair style to fit my Charlie Brown face and my buff body this past Friday. She said her gal there loves to do men's hair.
Can I say that I was not comfortable going to that place? I've been going to Tony, my same old Sicilian barber for 25 years and only when it's past the point of necessity. My wife's cute and athletic hair gal (who I know from the gym) and Mrs. BD agreed that my haircuts were primitive and made me look old and stodgy, like a dorky Senator from Arkansas or a dork from 1980. "Short or long?" was Tony's only question.
My heart beamed Friday night as my sons welcomed the Sabbath with perfectly sung prayers.My heart broke Saturday night as my sons fought while I grilled a perfect wild-caught salmon, and I got indigestion instead of the meal I thought I deserved.
I'm reminded of the saying, "A Man's children and his garden both reflect the amount of weeding done during the growing season." And, the growing goes both ways as we fathers grow, have to grow -- into the men we want to be under our children's careful observation, into the men that they need.
We yearn to please but, most important, to pass on life's lessons.
Father's Day is full of platitudes and real feelings, of missed and appreciated opportunities. And, of how much we care by just being there. I'm reminded of GeorgeStrait's "A Father's Love", of Conway Twitty's "That's My Job", of Rascal Flatt's "My Wish."True, heartfelt, and missing the tougher choices we have to make and impose to make as sure as we can that our children grow into responsible, resilient and caring adults.
There's a wisecrack, "If God is so perfect, how do you explain us."As fathers, we're not perfect, but we try to find and know the ways to be better, and most of us find it. We continue to strive, and so may our children, with a higher hand to reach for and give us the strength to be better and have hope.
5:6 So we are always confident; even though we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord --
5:7 for we walk by faith, not by sight.
5:8 Yes, we do have confidence, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.
5:9 So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him.
5:10 For all of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil.
5:11 Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we try to persuade others; but we ourselves are well known to God, and I hope that we are also well known to your consciences.
5:12 We are not commending ourselves to you again, but giving you an opportunity to boast about us, so that you may be able to answer those who boast in outward appearance and not in the heart.
5:13 For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you.
5:14 For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.
5:15 And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.
5:16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.
5:17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
My libertarian self is in favor, but my medical self is opposed. However, it remains a fact that more Americans die from overeating than from drug abuse, and food can not be illegalized. I tend to feel that government has little role in peoples' doing self-destructive things as long as we others do not have to pay their bills. Let reality rule. AA and NA cost nothing.
Lawns are foolish things but unless you live in the woods, a desert, or a beachy place, they are sort of expected.
A lawn is a certain sort of constantly-cut garden, copied from the estates of England where sheep kept the grass neatly cropped and sheep poop kept it fertilized. (Thus putting greens.)
If you want a happy lawn, I recommend aerating a lawn every two years with a coring machine, in late Spring. Or now. Every year, if it is used heavily by kids, animals, sports, or heavy mowers. If you have bare patches, overseed before coring.
At at about the same time, you topdress the grass with compost, manure, sand, or mixes of those. It works as mulch, fertilizer, worm food, microorganism food, etc. Health, because lawns are not natural and you have no sheep.
You can rent a coring machine anywhere for a day or two. Leave the cores on the grass. They disintegrate fast.
For large lawns or golf courses, large machines almost like farm manure-spreaders do the topdressing, but you can spread good compost mixes with a fertilizer spreader or with shovel and rake.
Around here, you can have a pleasant and useful lawn without irrigation and maybe only once or twice/year organic fertilizing if you treat it as the garden that sod is. You have to assume that lawns will brown up in the greatest heat of summer, but it's only a few weeks. That's natural grass dormancy. It bounces right back.
Irrigation and nitrogen fertilizer are like photoshopping a lawn. Fake. An important garden lawn might need irrigation though, to look Spring-like during the late summer weeks.
“There’s no greater threat to our democracy than a government that weaponizes its criminal justice system to target its citizens and in this case the target today is the President of the United States.”
Story here. We now understand that the SAT turned out to be basically a proxy for IQ. It makes sense to me for schools to be interested in IQ. Of course, there is far more to what a person might have to offer than IQ, but I think they ought to know that when making distinctions between applicants. Especially at a school like Chicago, which, unlike most of higher ed, requires that a graduate actually ends up knowing a lot of basic things which are not easy to learn.
I am just talking about Liberal Arts higher ed, of course.
"I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure… The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters."
For a long time, I’ve made the point that the Republican Party is not really a political party, in the sense that it is a coalition held together by common interests. Instead, it is more like a dumping ground for politicians, who no longer fit in with the Democrats.
One of Bob's songs about his conversion to Christ. Not sure what religion he is on board with now, but this was a song with powerful, mythic lyrics.
Now the nature of man Is to beg and to steal I'd do it myself, It's not so unreal The call of the wild's Forever at my door Want me to fly like an eagle while Being chained to the floor...
Why do they even measure these statistics? Can't we just view people as people? I am confident that nobody in the board of ed is discriminating against whites, hispanics, and blacks.
The people that you think of as "poor" -- like the people you see living on the streets, the beggars, the people in the shelters and those in the low income housing -- all of them, if they ask, have full access to benefits that, if counted, will immediately lift them out of measured poverty. Now, could there be some who, even though entitled to such benefits, somehow fall through the cracks because they fail to apply or to take advantage of what is offered? Of course. On the other hand, there are government workers out there every day looking for these people to try to help them. The remaining "real poor" can't actually be a significant part of the residual 2%.
... you’d think that the Left, which is always going on about the importance of dialogue, would champion Donald Trump’s efforts. They don’t, partly because they despise the messenger, partly because his success only underscores their own irrelevance. That in itself has its comic aspects, also its pathetic ones. I think that this is what Hegel called a world-historical moment. If so, I will also note that the dialectic, as the anti-Trump Chihuahuas are about to discover, is a remorseless engine of change. Yesterday people listened to you. Tomorrow, you have a million Twitter followers but no one cares what you say.
The Insanely Eventful Life of Grateful Dead Lyricist John Perry Barlow - 
Lawns are foolish things but unless you live in the woods, a desert, or a beachy place, they are sort of expected.
We're spending the weekend on the water. Picking up a boat in Essex CT, then out to Fisher's and Block Island.
