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.
All modern presidents of both parties have been too much with us. Talking incessantly, they have put politics unhealthily at the center of America’s consciousness.
George, they have put government unhealthily at the center of American life
The final stop on our 2-week driving travels was Syracuse. I neglected a lot of Sicilian food in my previous Sicily posts, but I will catch up with that below the fold along with other interesting stuff.
The links to my previous Sicily posts in the recent weeks:
“The point is, we are a big country,” says self-described democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. “The VA sees six and a half million people a year. Are people going to be treated badly? Are some people going to die because of poor treatment in the VA? Yes, that is a tragedy and we have to get to the root of it.”
"Not every regulation or government program is doomed to fail. But we might consider the slightly terrifying possibility that when government does get something right, it does so by accident, temporarily, and for reasons that it cannot understand or replicate. This may be why the sheer volume of law and regulation has been climbing so rapidly: Intuiting its own inefficacy, Washington is throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. The Entity with Whom politicians sometimes confuse themselves needed only ten commandments, not the ten thousand a year that Washington produces. Some of those coming down in the near future will be intended to reform the VA. The rational thing to do would be to abolish it. We’d be far better off paying veterans’ medical bills out of the Treasury than trying to operate a network of hospitals and clinics. And no matter what Washington promises to do to solve this problem, it is a good bet that the policy enacted will not produce the result intended. Reform is a random walk."
The mugshot is as much a part of everyday slang as it is an important part of police work. The concept of a mugshot, however, wasn't widely utilized until many years after photography was invented.
It began as the Rogue's Gallery, a series of pictures of New York's most notorious criminals, around 1857, some 20+ years after the first photograph was developed. No doubt as the cost of photography fell, the role of a photo as an effective police tool became apparent. It was a critical innovation of Chief Inspector Thomas Byrnes, a man known for aggressive police work, in the 1880s. Byrnes is also known as the developer of "The Dead Line" and "The Third Degree".
The Dead Line referred to an imaginary line drawn across Manhattan at Fulton Street, and based on the concept that criminals would be interested in the banks and jewelry stores south of said line. Any known criminal south of this line would be arrested on sight. In a day and age when 28 detectives were available to investigate the crimes among 2 million inhabitants, the money south of this line dictated policy.
Byrnes' most notable case was linked to one of the most famous serial killers of all time. Byrnes had claimed that Jack the Ripper would find it impossible to operate in New York City without being caught in 48 hours. Those wordswould haunthim.
Over the past year, Mrs. BD and I have been listening to NPR in the car, and I have been back to reading The New Yorker every week after boycotting them for many years.
Their appeal is their substantive content, not their political messaging. When it comes to news or politics, just mute the radio or skip the article to protect the heart from sudden, dangerous blood pressure rises. They each still have lots of other interesting stuff for the enjoyment of the effete and the elite like us Yankee rednecks.
Do I feel that NPR or PBS should exist? No, not unless entirely listener- or other-sponsored.
Way I think about it, Maggie's Farm has interesting stuff too, besides politics.
I have a very optimistic long-term outlook regarding our society. There are moments, however, which question my resolve. This is one of them.
It's articles like this that remind me Jean Baudrillard was right and I realize this isn't reality. It is an alternate reality, though. It seeks to simulate what the rest of us live. Kanye may feel comfortable calling out people like George W. Bush, or anyone else he doesn't like, but it's pretty clear he hasn't been in touch with reality for a long time.
The real question is why people like this continue to get coverage. My guess is they fear slipping into obscurity, and the best way to avoid it is to be outrageous and 'make news'.
Since real news isn't important to many people anymore, people like Kanye and the Kardashians can continue to dominate. Analysis is meaningless, the only thing important today (and don't think Obama isn't well aware of this) is a good photo, a headline, some Tweets to your peeps, and positive coverage on "The Daily Show" and any other Comedy Central program that purports to 'deliver the news'.
Our political discourse assumes, sometimes implicitly but often explicitly, that there exists a predictable, linear, straightforward relationship between the formal enactment of a given policy and the real-world outcomes that will be experienced as a result of it. This is a convenient fiction, and sometimes even the authors of that fiction roll their eyes at their own work, as when the Congressional Budget Office scored the Affordable Care Act and then added the caveat that its analysts did not believe that the policy would be implemented the way the law’s authors intended and the White House promised, thereby communicating that its report should be consumed only in saline solution.
Politics is mostly words about words, but it has real-world consequences, and death is not an uncommon one. The truth, which in Washington is an unspeakable truth, is that almost the entirety of our conversation about politics is predicated on a fundamental error in our understanding of reality. Unlike a certain Entity with Whom presidents and senators sometimes seem to confuse themselves, politicians cannot speak reality into being. (“Let there be . . . health care.”) The situation at the VA should not surprise us; what did we expect, having no way of even knowing what we should have expected? This outcome was at least as likely as any other, and certainly more likely than one in which reality matched policy through some obscure divine office unknown to us.
...climate scientists are trying to create some kind of weird world where model results have some sort of independent reality, where in fact the model results should be trusted over measurements when the two diverge. If this is science -- which it is not -- but if it were, then I would be anti-science.
Re-posted because I failed to follow my own instructions and my rhubarb patch bolted. Dealt with it today - a bit too late.
I am a fan of Rhubarb. It's tangy. Best rhubarb dish? Rhubarb cobbler with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
Rhubarb won't grow much in the southern US. It requires cold winters and does not enjoy long, hot summers. A good thing about the plants is that they are perennial and last for many years. In fact, a rhubarb patch will last forever if you divide the plants every few years. They are fairly heavy feeders and like a good dose of manure regularly. The leaves are so dense that a patch doesn't really grow weeds.
When I was a kid, my Mom had the rhubarb patch right outside the horse barn, and she would routinely toss some horse poop on it. The fresh poop did not seem to bother the rhubarb.
The only problem I have had with growing rhubarb is its bolting and rapidly going to seed. That needs to be prevented by cutting off the flowering stalks promptly before they grow tall.
Once upon a time, a friend of mine accidentally took over thousands of computers. He had found a vulnerability in a piece of software and started playing with it. In the process, he figured out how to get total administration access over a network. He put it in a script, and ran it to see what would happen, then went to bed for about four hours. Next morning on the way to work he checked on it, and discovered he was now lord and master of about 50,000 computers. After nearly vomiting in fear he killed the whole thing and deleted all the files associated with it. In the end he said he threw the hard drive into a bonfire. I can’t tell you who he is because he doesn’t want to go to Federal prison, which is what could have happened if he’d told anyone that could do anything about the bug he’d found. Did that bug get fixed? Probably eventually, but not by my friend. This story isn’t extraordinary at all. Spend much time in the hacker and security scene, you’ll hear stories like this and worse.
Down Under, the Immigration "Rules Have Changed"; "Anyone seeking to illegally enter Australia … will never make Australia home
Making School Lunches Healthier Doesn't Mean Kids Will Eat Them - A new study found that less than half of students took a vegetable from the lunch line and ate some of it.
We attended a family funeral on Saturday down in NJ. All of the vets' graves had flags. There were so many that it looked like a field of flags. The husband, my uncle-in-law, of the sweet gal who died was in the Normandy invasion, and in the war until it ended. By the end of the war, he was one of four surviving from his original platoon. Still in good shape. His war stories are remarkable - taking a castle! I sat next to a cousin-in-law USAF Col. at the funeral lunch. Vietnam Vet. All Irish, all warm and amusing - and all fairly sober.
I have mostly exhausted my interest in posting about the complexities of the "mad or bad" topic but in this case, based on minimal evidence, I'd guess "bad."
Psychiatry has little influence over evil. That's for theology. Evil fantasies are things we (and everybody, pretty much) deal with routinely, but actions are another matter. The devil is stronger than we doctors are. Some evil is everywhere, from boardrooms to government to priests and pastors to teachers to cities to campuses. Please do not tell me that this kid had "PTSD," or an "anger management problem." Some people lack a moral compass almost entirely, but that moral compass spectrum spans from none to spotty to obsessionally scrupulous and fearful. We can deal with the latter relatively easily, but not the former.
The truth is that some people are "born to be hanged," and, at the least, removed from the gene pool. We too often piously imagine that happy and good are default settings for humans as if we could get everybody there with a rearranged psyche and a right environment (we term that "psycho-utopian"). It's an evil lie and an evil vision because it denies the existence of evil itself. My life, and history, have taught me that sin has great power. For all we know, violence, deceit, and destruction of good cheer are the default settings, and civilized behavior a special, difficult undertaking. That happens to be what Freud concluded, and he was smarter and a deeper thinker than I am. Not to mention many prophets, and Christ himself.
It is a positive comment on our level of Western civilization that we are surprised by gross acts of evil rather than taking them for granted. Quite remarkable in human history.
Good and evil remain the basics, as they always have done.
Addendum: I realize that my metaphors sounded as if I believed that evil is genetic. What I mean is that some people simply seem destined for trouble.
2300 Americans died in that invasion. Did the Sicilians want us there? Of course not.
At that point, I think it was the most massive invasion by sea in history.
I reflect on all of the historical invasions of Sicily by sea - the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Moslems, the Norman Vikings, the Spanish (barely an invasion), and the take-over by Italy (again, hardly a serious invasion but Italy did send military forces to annex Sicily). Uniquely, the Allies didn't invade to own it and had no aspirations to, but it was a strategic, temporary necessity.
(Reader reminded me that I omitted the Romans and the Byzantines. Too much to keep track of. Everybody wanted to own Sicily, and all of that history is still right there, right down to the Phoenician fortifications, the Greek temples, the Norman castles, the Roman cities, and the couscous and the mosques - and even Greek temples - converted to churches.)
Image is the historic flag of Sicily - most interesting flag in the world.
17:22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, "Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.
17:23 For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, 'To an unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.
17:24 The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands,
17:25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.
17:26 From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live,
17:27 so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him--though indeed he is not far from each one of us.
17:28 For 'In him we live and move and have our being'; as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we too are his offspring.'
17:29 Since we are God's offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.
17:30 While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent,
17:31 because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead."
Looks like Thomas Piketty fudged data to make his case. Not all that surprising, since we're familiar with how those on the Left love fudged data (cough, cough, East Anglia, cough).
It's also not surprising that the true believers still think there's value in his 'theoretical framework'.
Notably, choice schools can hire their teachers based on their own criteria — such as advanced study and experience — not the criteria used by public schools, which look at the number of education courses completed. Moreover, Walberg writes, choice schools pay teachers based on their performance, and teachers who do not perform are likely to be fired.
Bob Dylan might be a poet, a thief, a genius, or a fraud. He might be stone-cold crazy, like the Dylanologists who worship him. But he’s not what you thought he was. He’s much more interesting than that.
Dallas Willard's
We live in the best of times, 
I forget where I found that image (ok, reader reminds that it was our friend 
The good news for today: 
Since it's Sicily Month at Maggie's, on this Decoration Day weekend I am reviewing the 
For some fans of Bob Dylan,