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.
On Saturday morning, we'll be kayaking through the vast Nauset Marsh, checking out the wildlife, communing with the marsh gods, and getting a moderate workout for a few hours. It's a maze, easy to get lost when you can't see over the marsh grasses.
Everybody understands that water wants to kill you.
Same in the US, altho China is more obvious about its attempts to control markets. In the US, ZIRP and QE were errors in the beginning, and led to a bubble stock market which needs a meaningful correction, a high colonic enema. Central banks distort markets, distort reality.
The Long Rise of the Secular Faith - The threat to religious liberty has its roots in a progressivist faith that has been steadily gaining momentum in America for at least a century and a half.
Nobody understands that you have to be able to do it first. You can't deconstruct a goddamned thing until you can do it, and if you could do it, you wouldn't get the urge to deconstruct it. Frank Gehry can't design a proper two-holer so he designs giant monstrosities to hide the fact.
Politics is the same. You will never elect anyone to take the government apart. Once you know how to work it well enough to get in charge of it, you don't want to wreck it. You want to lord over it and add to it. No one wants the bulldozed empty lot where a Post Office once stood to be named after them. Humans don't work that way.
Blasphemy laws are ridiculous, outdated, historical anachronisms. But what's interesting is, in Britain, for example, we no longer have blasphemy laws - that was seen as being a great step forward... - but what they did was introduce hate speech laws instead.
So we...no longer have old-fashioned religious blasphemy laws, we have a kind of secular blasphemy laws: there are new [rules] you are allowed not to break, there are new groups you are not allowed not to offend ...and in many ways, more insidious and pervasive than blasphemy ever was - which was a dead law on the statute books for most of the last 100 years. -- Mick Hume of Spiked!
Glad my kids don't go here. It's unfortunate that this is in my home state of NJ. It's unfortunate this is the prevailing viewpoint at many universities. I am not aware of any notifications like this at Syracuse, or Miami (OH), where my boys are. However, I know this pattern of thinking is common at both schools.
There has been some strange collateral damage in the Republican War on Women. We taught them that cooking and cleaning are for squares and they shouldn’t know how to do either. This has left young women today with apartments that are complete pigsties. There is nothing in the fridge and a mountain of clothes in one corner and a futon on the floor. This means millennial males end up having to do the cooking and cleaning themselves. Oh well, you can’t win them all.
America’s two major political parties have always been fundamentally different. The Republican Party has been rooted in the moral principles and transcendent values expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Democratic Party acknowledges that the starting point of the country may have been the Declaration and the Constitution, but since Woodrow Wilson many Democratic Party leaders have contended that progress requires constant adaptation, changing morals, and liberal interpretations of law and history.
The progressive philosophy that the Democratic Party has come to embrace now has its roots less in the values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of individual happiness and more in the tenets of race and class identity, equal outcomes, and an expanding welfare state. Since individuals vary in talent, ability, and motivation and the free market system produces unequal outcomes of success, a core principle of the Democratic Party is now redressing this disparity through the redistribution of wealth.
In 2 weeks it will be time to harvest my peach crop. I have a neighbor pal who likes to get into the tree with me, and shares the harvest. Mrs. BD will make us a couple of peach pies (my favorite pie), and I will can 10-12 jars of peach chutney.
The
growing importance of social skills in the labor market - See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/08/the-growing-importance-of-social-skills-in-the-labor-market.html#sthash.3m0UeYyV.dpuf
6:10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power.
6:11 Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
6:12 For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
6:13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm.
6:14 Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness.
6:15 As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace.
6:16 With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one.
6:17 Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
6:18 Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints.
6:19 Pray also for me, so that when I speak, a message may be given to me to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel,
6:20 for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it boldly, as I must speak.
Mrs. BD swam her daily laps, I didn't because my Greater Trochanteric Pain Syndrome - caused by my enthusiastic workout efforts - makes swimming too painful. If you workout hard, you will get aches and pains. Anyway, I did my cardio early this morning and am still stumbling around. I splashed in the salt water for a while, and worked on growing some skin cancers from the beneficial solar radiation. I dislike swimming in fresh water anyway. Grew up in salt water, even a salt water pool.
I overheard 2 languages from my beach chair. One was French and the other was Cute American Teen Girl (which is closely-related to High Gay Dialect).
Meanwhile, NYC daughter and boyfriend went out for a long sail with our pup on board. They said the pup enjoyed it until they grounded the keel on a rock. It was insensitive of me, later, to remind them that I have all of the charts. Always consult a chart in unfamiliar waters. Sheesh.
Best car ride ever filmed: C'était un rendez-vous by Claude Lelouch
Cherchez la femme. What is he driving up to Montmatre? Great film, but an excellent fake by a fine film maker. The truth ruins it, so do not watch the part after the rendez-vous.
I had a little spare time the other morning, so I did one last harvest from my rhubarb patch to make another batch of Rhubarb-Hot Pepper Jam. Golly, it is delicious and tangy. For the pepper component, I used chopped sorenos, jalapenos, and some sweet red peppers too just for their flavor. A little lemon juice and a dash of salt. Rhubarb is not to everybody's taste, but I love it.
I use one cup of chopped peppers per 3 cups of chopped rhubarb. I'll use up the rest of my chopped peppers to make ordinary hot pepper jelly. Sometimes I make it like a sauce, sometimes like a firmer jelly. Regardless, it is a bit too hot for some people.
My peppery special jams and jellies go well with cheese, cream cheese, pork, chicken, scrambled eggs, or anything else. Available at your specialty food store never. Photo is hot pepper jelly with cream cheese, but goat cheese is better. Any cheese, really.
The Suicide of the Liberal Arts - Indoctrinating students isn’t the same as teaching them. Homer and Shakespeare have much to tell us about how to think and how to live.
Like most conservationists, I believe that Smokey The Bear is obsolete. He was, in fact, an agent of the lumber industry as administered and subsidized by the US Forest Service. Lives and money should not be spent to combat a necessary natural process. As that article notes:
"What we're getting now are much more intense fires because of all those years of suppression," said John Freemuth, a Boise State University professor and a public lands expert. "Those kinds of intense fires are usually not allowed to burn."
Government fire-suppression policies, like so many government policies, have unintended consequences which are worse than the original problem. If you must have a house in the woods or fire zone, get fire insurance and hope for the best. Or don't. Monitoring fires from the air is a worthwhile government - or private -warning service, same as storms.
And let the trees burn. That restarts the natural succession which produces an abundance of wildlife and biodiversity. Brave as they are, these firefighters die horribly for no good reason at all.
When I was a poor boy in Brooklyn, I read as many biographies of great people as I could, in order to learn what character traits led to their accomplishments so I could learn how to raise myself in the world.Now, many decades later, I live content that I have lived my dreams and fantasies and along the way have marked up a few signal accomplishments that made a real difference. There was a character trait that I don’t recall showing up in the bios I devoured, one which has given me satisfaction, being content with living on one’s own terms, regardless the prices. That is the character trait that you, the reader will see in the memoir written by one of my oldest friends, Sol Sanders, PEOPLE!: Vignettes gathered along the way through a long life.
On his 89th birthday. Sol’s life and anecdotes are a testament to full tilt living a “Forrest Gump” existence as an
international journalist. I and everyone who knows him delight in his behind the curtain tales of history being made or bungled, of personal insights into the mighty and often their salacious private lives. For years, I nudged Sol to get it down in a book. There are so very few such very revealing autobiographies. Sol includes me in his dedications, writing that I “made the original suggestion for this memoir but who bears no responsibility for its metamorphosis.” That’s right, because Sol has crafted a unique memoir beyond what I had in mind as a standard chronology that emphasized the magnitude of the events he witnessed and the inside stories of the events and those who made the history of the latter half of the 20th century.
Instead, what stands out in Sol’s memoir is his journey, the rocks or rapids of fate and purpose, and the personalities of the great and influential he met. It is the personalities and environment that are the focus, and hence the book’s title PEOPLE! As Sol writes at the end of his memoir, “These individual pieces obviously were purposely not chronologically arranged, in an attempt to give the reader an overall sense of the larger tableau on which my life has been written….I do not intend that the reader will come away with any specific knowledge of my life and times, but rather a general impression.” Sol’s memoir is a series of brief chapters about the personalities and foibles he encountered, and along the way reveals his formative experiences, the happenstances that flung him from a tiny mountain town in North Carolina through the first J-School, headlong into the close of WWII in Italy, on to Paris, India, Indonesia, IndoChina, Japan, NYC editor of world news, and today still a columnist whose discussions and judgments are among the most concise and telling one can find anywhere. There are 381-pages of tales, and there could have been many times more as I recollect many of Sol’s adventures and interactions that aren’t in the book.
For the reader who has not had such a life, or who is not familiar enough with the history of the second half of the 20th
Century, Sol’s hopping around may be unusual. For me there are many parallels which make Sol’s ruminations and adventures personally touching and sometimes a mirror, prowling the alleys of Flatbush as Sol prowled the alleys of Franklin, patient adults who took us under their wings, growing up with a Judaism, core values and integrity that was imprinted through family life and love, heedless of family restraints or prudence setting off to experience and conquer the world on our own terms, starting out as a young socialist (a quite different thing among early 20th century immigrants – focused on the dignity of the individual – rather than the overwhelming, homogenizing, incompetent welfare state of today) but becoming more conservative as reality taught other overriding lessons, bouncing from place to place to be in the centers of what’s happening in the world and meeting up with and basking in friendships with the powerful, forming judgments that come from the front line and from behind the Potempkin fronts that those who haven’t that exposure lack, and loving almost every minute of it.
Maybe in another 22-years, when I am Sol’s age, I can commit the unembarrassed self-exposure that Sol does in his memoir. For now, come along and meet Westmoreland, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Bill Casey, McNamara, Kuan Yew, Diem, Norman Thomas, and so many others your head may spin. Meet some personalities of whom you may never have heard, who shaped our history. Go through India and Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam (where Sol was one of the best correspondents, due to his personal relationships with Vietnamese insiders), Laos and Cambodia, Japan, journalism, as they went through the decades after WWII and took us along. Feel the friendships that Sol enjoyed. If you want to understand people and the real world, live in it, or at least get a glimpse in Sol Sanders memoir.
Germany
fact of the day, will support for immigration collapse? - See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/08/germany-projection-of-the-day.html#sthash.99uUvG13.dpuf
Molecular
scientists unexpectedly produce new type of glass - See more at:
http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2015/08/13/molecular-scientists-unexpectedly-produce-new-type-glass#sthash.iSthJMGb.dpuf
I keep learning more about exercise physiology. A few thoughts:
- Strength training and cardio go hand-in-hand because without increasing strength, one can't accomplish the effort and apply the power needed for intense cardio. I do resistance 2/wk, mixed cardio-resistance 1/wk, and cardio 3/wk (that's for 2015, not forever).
- Walking, hiking, jogging, recreational biking and swimming, and most sports are not cardio exercise unless you are in cardiac rehab. They are just applications of your fitness. Of course, the whole purpose of a fitness pursuit is to have something to apply vigorously in real life. I think of it like learning math: You internalize this hard thing so you can do that other thing that you really want or need to do. Like hike up Mt. Greylock or Mt. Washington, or ski all day with good control, kayak a few miles, etc.
- Cardio workouts have to be as intense and powerful as possible. It seems that plodding along is not worth the time unless you are in your 80s or 90s. Intervals are best, probably. As the trainer said, if you can talk you aren't working it and if you are not dripping and stumbling you didn't do it.
- If you are not too fit or strong, I think difficult cardio builds some degree of strength along with the endurance and the heart challenge/stress it provides. In other words, "cardio" is not pure cardio at all for most of us ordinary schlubs.
- Around 30 minutes is enough. Many cardiologists say 20 minutes 2-3X/wk is good. I do 3X for now. When up to 30 mins, you just increase the intensity, challenge, and power-required in the same time box. That's efficient, because you have a job and a family. It's not time - it's intensity. I am at 30 mins and working on increasing difficulty, stress, and intensity each week.
- I like to mix up a cardio session to keep it interesting. As long as there are no breaks at all between things, that works to maintain an elevated heart rate and pushes the fatigue envelope to the limit. Gotta jump quick between things. I think my ideal lunatic cardio morning would be 15 mins elliptical intervals, 20 fast heavy ball smashes and 20 fast mini-squats with low-weight mil. lifts done twice, then 15 min intervals on inclined treadmill. Finish up and rest with a one-minute plank of some sort. That will leave me pooped and panting for a while, and ready for the day. I would mix in a row but it inflames my back and hip flexors the same way sit-ups do.
- When I am done, I go home and have a well-salted hard-boiled egg for breakfast. A little protein, just in case. Trainer says to have 2, but one egg is all I want. Plus coffee, an Advil, and a cigar of course. Rewards. And Mrs, BD says "Whoa - lookin' good. How do you feel?" "Tired."
If you want to see what unlimited immigration (against the consent of the people) looks like, take a look at Europe. Mezzican immigrants now amount to what had been 1/3 of the Mexican population. That is an invasion, and it is without our consent. If we want to consent to that, then fine. However, I can say that there is not a single job I had while growing up which is not occupied by immigrants. What work would I do today as a 13 or 15 year-old eager beaver?
The dominant issue in the West is immigration. The ruling elites are obsessed with filling up our lands with people from other lands. It’s nearly impossible to get members of the elite to discuss the matter, much less explain their reasoning. A politician or party that embraces immigration reform, even mild reform, is treated like a Holocaust denier. Even climate change, which is pretty much a religion at this point, is more open to debate than immigration.
Shark 
In 2 weeks it will be time to harvest my peach crop. I have a neighbor pal who likes to get into the tree with me, and shares the harvest. Mrs. BD will make us a couple of peach pies (my favorite pie), and I will can 10-12 jars of peach chutney.
Her
Fallen firefighters remembered as heroes 
