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.
As the weather begins to lose the chill, looking forward to getting to the chilly Cape Cod salt water, the bug-free salty breeze, and Wellfleet Oysters. Not to mention all of the cheerful fun-loving, people (even if many are lefty nutjobs).
What am I especially looking forward to this year? Biking and /or hiking the Cape Cod Rail Trail. It's the old railroad bed that used to service NYC and Boston up to Provincetown. Now there are buses.
What do we do out there? Outdoors dawn to dusk, rain or shine, with friends and family. Dawn workout, then biking, kayaking, maybe rent a little outboard and go fish for blues and stripers, body surf in the ocean, play in one of the big ponds, take a multi-hour hike, maybe rent a little sailboat for a few hours, bird-watching whenever outdoors, seafood dinners always. Minimal internet time or inactive beaching, because that's not the way we roll out there. Time is too precious.
“Another way in which I tried to define the crank was that he always begins at the wrong end. He never knows the right way to take hold of anything, as one takes hold of a cat by the scruff of the neck. He always tries to catch his cat by the tail; especially if it is a Manx cat. The thing he begins with is always the thing that is last — and least. Thus, if he is talking about the ancient and lawful bond between man and woman, he will talk about votes before he talks about vows. Thus, if he is talking about children, he will be genuinely interested in the children’s schools; it will never so much as cross his mind that children, as a class, generally belong to families. If he is interested in Shakespeare, he will not be interested in Shakespeare’s poetry; he will be interested in the extraordinary question of who wrote it. If he is interested in one of the Gospels or in one of the Epistles, he will not be interested in what is written there; he will be interested in some bottomless bosh about when it was written.”
The college screechers disparage manliness, but the real world continues to value specific, ideal manly qualities because they are so useful in life and helpful to others. Young men, listen up.
Historically, the path from boy to man was hard-earned and marked by specific achievements. With the modern invention of adolescence and "extended adolescence", the lines are blurred. Like the song says, a "mannish boy" is not a man. Puberty does not make a man, nor does sexual activity.
Are the ideal "manly" qualities today very different from those of the past? I don't know. I can tell you what qualities my friends aspire to and work towards as a life-long project: providing for and protecting family and progeny, independence, courage and shame for weakness, the willingness to take risk, the willingness to be tough and forceful when needed, a seriousness about life while remaining cheerful, physical fitness and athletic development, mental fitness, spiritual development, skill development of all sorts, community involvement, responsibility and integrity, kindness and being a good friend, having constructive life goals, generosity of spirit, etc etc. We discuss these things in our men's Bible study group.
It's a tall order, and that is exactly the point. We all raise boys to aspire towards these qualities, knowing full well that it is a challenging and difficult path with many speed bumps and disappointments. (How different or difficult the path is for women is not something I feel qualified to discuss.)
When I went off to prep school at 13, on the first day the Headmaster said to us (paraphrased from memory): "Welcome, boys. You have said your goodbyes to your parents and have had a nice lunch. We are delighted to have you now officially join our school. I am sorry to tell you that we will make it very hard for you and you will suffer many disappointments but we expect that you boyswill become adult young men who are a credit to this school when you graduate. One more warning. Disappoint us too deeply and you will be sent home to your Mom. Please do not do that. Since we picked each of you carefully and personally, we expect that each one of you will have victories too in whatever areas you choose. If you have troubles with something, let us know. We are on your side but we will be tough in expecting and demanding your success, so get ready for the adventure. Give everything your best. You have one hour to settle into your rooms, and then report to the Field House for your health and physical fitness and sports assessments. Good luck, boys, and I will see you tomorrow morning in Chapel."
Good little speech about male privilege. Although the intellectual challenges were intense, overall it seemed secondary to their focus on personal development, to expand oneself to become the best, most developed person you could be. School, or parents, same message.
Call them self-employed, or gig workers, or outside contractors if you want. People who get no paychecks or job benefits.
For people who value independence and being their own boss, the price paid in uncertainty, lack of external structure, and anxiety, is worth it. There is nothing new about this. If you are a plumber with a truck you are a gig worker. So is a guy with a barbershop.
One might think that there is an epidemic of Alzheimer's deaths, and those who seek funding for Alzheimer's will tell you so. The reality is that the rising deaths from Alzheimer's is a measure of medical success in dealing with the other ailments which have tended to kill people sooner than Alzheimer's.
We'll all die from something. Eventually something gives out, even the brain. Carpe diem, and try not to have a family history of Alzheimer's.
Facebook now admits that it is behaving more like a publisher, with an editorial view, than a neutral platform where users get to choose what they read. Its head of news partnerships has said that Facebook now has a “point of view” on the news, while Zuckerberg himself says that Facebook, not its users, will now determine what counts as a “quality” news source.
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It is not as if news publications can go elsewhere. Facebook, with 2 billion users, has no serious competitor in social media. Other methods of distributing news on the internet are inferior, rapidly declining, or else controlled by one of the other tech giants, whose track record of arbitrary rule-changes is as bad as Facebook’s.
Last week I posted on Does Language Shape Our Thoughts? The subject provoked some discussion. It is true that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis turns out to have little empirical support, but I'll stand by my experience that a new word or phrase, and the concept in them, certainly effect the ways I think and can even give me a new tool to think in a new way. Heck, that is called "education." (a quote on the topic below the fold)
I think one problem might be taking the implications of a theory too far, too globally. This brings me to the notion of "social construction," popularized by Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality.After I read it, I asked my professor whether social constructionism might be a social construct.
Berger and Luckmann's claims were stimulating and I am certain that they have limited application despite being unreinforced by data. (I don't know how one gets data on such types of epistemologic theorizing.) However they were welcomed by radicals and deconstruction postmodernists who took them to extremes, sometimes to psychotic levels of subjectivity, because they appeared to support the ideas of the infinite malleability of the human mind and heart, and the impossibility of objectivity.
We use jump rope as a form of calisthenic/cardio exercise, and as a form of HIIT cardio with speed intervals or variations on ordinary singles. The variations are much more cardio demanding than plain singles.
Is jumping a hard impact on joints? Nope. Properly done, the steps are lighter than those of ordinary walking which pounds your heels. Ankle hops, not real jumps.
Since I have been jumping at my gym, I see more and more guys doing it. Few gals do it, maybe because of the boing-boing. One of the guys, a tall slender black dude, is a jump rope artist. He is like a dancer, varying his form from singles to doubles to side steps to scissor steps to running man to single-leg hops, seemingly effortlessly with small efficient steps. I want to get there, but I never will.
At this point, I can do singles for fairly long (but I rarely do them for more than a couple of minutes at a time), Running Man, and I am beginning to get relaxed with scissor step and the jack step. It's all about rhythm, cool and relaxed, just letting the rope go on autopilot.
Here's the scissor step. If you have learned Running Man, it's pretty easy to get the hang of it. She is pretty good, but I think the steps ideally are smaller and lighter. For good form, note how her arms and hands never change position.
The pigeon of cities and barns is actually the European Rock Dove. It's been introduced all around the world. In its natural wild state it was partial to cliffs and mountains so urban settings are comfortable for the species.
The Rock Dove has been domesticated and bred for thousands of years, so today there is much variety in feral pigeons. People raised them in dovecotes.
Perhaps the best use of pigeons is for shooting practice. I've done that. Good fun. Second best, raising them for squab. Squab is delicious. I recommend it if you can find it on a menu. A colleague of mine used to raise pigeons. He would serve rare squab breast on top of a sauteed squab liver, on a bed of lentils. Wonderful.
Pigeons are a favored food of Peregrine Falcons. They knock the stuffing out of them in the air, then catch them on their way down.
Jamie Oliver has a recipe for adult pigeon.Nobody wants to dine on a city pigeon, but I suspect country pigeons could be good.
At Powerline re economic inequality, "... the 400 richest Americans control more wealth than the poorest 80 million households, and “the richest citizens continue to capture the lion’s share of new wealth."
It is an absurd discussion, because the only way wealth can be "captured" is by theft, fraud, or taxation. The zero-sum fallacy is there, as usual. Still, the best solution to extreme statistical inequality suggested there would be to confiscate the assets of the top 400, or 1000, or 10,000, or 100,000, and to ship those people to New Zealand or Tasmania just in case they might be tempted to try to get rich again in the US.
When rid of the richest, you can begin to go after the kulaks. After a while, there is nobody left to tax and economic equality ensues (except for our Leaders, of course - some pigs are more equal than others). It's great. No, it's awesome.
Mints will invade everything. My Mom would just let it loose in a meadow. When the meadow was mowed, wow. Great smell. When you needed some for lemonade, it was out there.
Same goes for beautiful flowering vines like Trumpet Vine and Wisteria. Their desires to spread and metastasize via underground roots are relentless and close to impossible to prevent. My advice is not to plant them anywhere they cannot be mowed around.
Bamboo. Unless you have a good local Panda population, you will be sorry you even planted it. Agent Orange is one approach.
What sorts of garden plants have you had difficulty controlling?
Restaurants 
Dog rescuers, flush with donations, 
NECCO wafers
The pigeon of cities and barns is actually the European