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.
You shall hear how Hiawatha Prayed and fasted in the forest, Not for greater skill in hunting, Not for greater craft in fishing, Not for triumphs in the battle, And renown among the warriors, But for profit of the people, For advantage of the nations.
First he built a lodge for fasting, Built a wigwam in the forest, By the shining Big-Sea-Water, In the blithe and pleasant Spring-time, In the Moon of Leaves he built it, And, with dreams and visions many, Seven whole days and nights he fasted.
On the first day of his fasting Through the leafy woods he wandered; Saw the deer start from the thicket, Saw the rabbit in his burrow, Heard the pheasant, Bena, drumming,
Heard the squirrel, Adjidaumo, Rattling in his hoard of acorns, Saw the pigeon, the Omeme, Building nests among the pinetrees, And in flocks the wild-goose, Wawa, Flying to the fen-lands northward, Whirring, wailing far above him. "Master of Life!" he cried, desponding, "Must our lives depend on these things?"
On the next day of his fasting By the river's brink he wandered, Through the Muskoday, the meadow, Saw the wild rice, Mahnomonee, Saw the blueberry, Meenahga, And the strawberry, Odahmin, And the gooseberry, Shahbomin, And the grape.vine, the Bemahgut, Trailing o'er the alder-branches, Filling all the air with fragrance! "Master of Life!" he cried, desponding, "Must our lives depend on these things?"
The entire poem, a collection of Algonquin Indian myths, here, with a little commentary. Read it outloud to your kids or spouse. They will never forget it.
Photo is Augustus Saint-Gaudens' (1848-1907) Hiawatha, marble, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
These people who seem to believe they are the spawn of aliens, animals inside a human body, boys who believe they are girls, and all the other sorts of silly fantasy lives that people put on display today, are people with only the slightest grip on reality.
I would never claim that we shrinks and psychoanalysts have the power to change such unfortunate fantasies/delusions, but seeing other physicians collude with such fantasies disturbs me more than a little bit.
Many rightly criticize Psychiatry for over-pathologizing human variation, but normalizing total weirdness is another matter. Strange is strange, and nobody should be afraid to say so in fear of the Thought Police.
Jeff Daniels, from the TV show The Newsroom, lists out America's standing in the world in a few choice categories. (language warning in effect)
I loved the comment about angels. One of my sisters-in-law believes in them. (Or is it fairies?)
Of course, all of the above could be easily dismissed as 'So what?'. Okay, friggin' Uganda beat us in math. So what? It doesn't make any difference. The only bottom-line question is, would you rather live here or in Uganda?
And there's one facet of life that America's so good at that there's not even a second place:
Weather.
Because our one big mountain range is placed exactly where it is, slightly off to one side, our continent has the vast Food Belt in the center, and on the outside of the eastern coast runs the Gulf Stream current, protecting that side of the continent with a belt of warmth. On the west coast, the Sierras and Cascades act as a buffer, keeping the worse ravages the Pacific has to offer at bay.
In South America, the mountain range is too near the coast, so you end up with very little habitable land on one side and lots of barren or swampy nothingness on the other.
The Eurasian continent is simply too big and is becluttered by large mountain ranges, and what little 'food belt' there is lies in some of the poorest, most underpopulated, underindustrialized countries on the continent, the ex-Russian -stan states.
So, when it comes to a nation's overall weather — you know, the stuff you actually have to live in — ours is so bountiful that, as I said, there's not even a second place.
Funny how lucky Lefties always get with their investments. Everybody still wonders how Harry Reid has $10 million after a life in "government service."
Of course, since the subject is global warming, I suppose I wax redundant.
As you know, every storm, drought, plague, meteor shower, volcanic eruption and earthquakian upheaval is because of your neighbor's SUV. Curse his ragged hide.
This is especially true with large storms, the perfect example of which would be SuperstormSandy, she of the Category 1 level — the lowest hurricane level — with some meteorologists claiming it had dropped down to Tropical Storm level by the time it actually hit land.
The only reason New York City had all the flooding was because Sandy (1) hit at high tide, (2) hit right as there was an extra-large low pressure area out to sea, allowing the tide to rise even higher than normal, and (3) the fact that NYC had been hit by two storms even larger than Sandy in the previous 100 years, both times the sea wall had been breached with the resultant massive flooding, yet they never did anything about it.
In the meantime, how much money has NYC spent on 'green' measures because of the peril of global warming? True; it, too, is supposed to breach the sea walls, but over the course of a century — not the two hours it took Sandy.
This week's example of global warming run amok was Snowquester, the largest, meanest, baddest storm that global warming run amok has yet produced!
So did all the schools. The AGW advocates, however, were thrilled, and were halfway through writing their next article citing Snowquester as just a sign of things to come when the bad news struck.
What the article doesn't mention is that the popular Indonesian volcano is probably belching more CO2 into the atmosphere every half-hour than mankind has over its entire existence.
I find myself wondering how the college students of today can be so full of hate and intolerance that they require mandatory regrooving. Perhaps there is only so much sanctimonious bs one can absorb without vomiting or laughing.
This reminds me of a local town employee who got in a little trouble with his free speech at work and was sent to mandatory diversity training. He told me afterwards "I went to their classes, but it didn't take."
There's a fairly interesting documentary out there called Microcosmos. It's a flick on the world of bugs, a subject I've always been interested in. To all the bugs I inadvertently killed by placing them in glass jars to study when I was a kid — sorry about that. Shit happens.
The documentary did, in one way, set itself apart from your usual documentary fare.
Here's what the narrator says at the beginning:
A meadow in early morning, somewhere on earth. Hidden here is a world as vast as our own, where the weeds are like impenetrable jungles, a stone's a mountain, and even the smallest pond becomes an ocean.
Time passes differently here. An hour is like a day, a day is like a season. And the passing of a season is a lifetime.
To observe this world, we must fall silent now, and listen to its murmurs.
Those are the last words spoken for over an hour.
Herewith I present ten of its more magical moments.
That Damned Interdimensional Barrier
At least, if you're a bug.
Here are four scenes dealing with that dreaded interdimensional barrier — at least, if you're a bug — known as adhesion or surface tension. In the first one, while it probably just looks that way, it appears the ant is having trouble penetrating the bead of water. Yet, in the next scene, the ants are lappin' away around the ol' water hole like a herd of buffaloes.
That brings us to the third part and one of everybody's favorite critters, the water skeeter. Now here's an animal that knows how to use adhesion to its advantage.
But the fourth scene poses something of a question. If the water skeeter is using adhesion to its advantage, what are these guys using? Reverse adhesion?
By recreational drugs, I mean everything from pot to crystal meth and heroin.
They are all readily available on most streets in the US (but at far-above free market prices despite being free of sales taxes) and are widely popular. I find it difficult, from a libertarian point of view, to make a continuing argument for our Federal ongoing, attempted but failed prohibition. If some people want to live in a haze for a few hours - or all the time, why not (as long as I do not have to support them)?
In a free country, having things be legal does not mean that you condone them morally, spiritually, or in any other way. Adultery is not illegal, and neither is devil-worship nor alcohol abuse. Recreational drugs used to be legal in the US, and I doubt there were more social problems with them back then. Maybe less, because when they were not illegal they were cheap. Are any of our readers old enough to remember when there was cocaine in Coke?
Funnily enough, now a Large Coke without coke is illegal in New York. Crazy world in which it is easier to buy cocaine in front of the minimart than it is to buy a Big Gulp inside.
What's your opinion?
Just don't make the argument that "It's bad for people." That will not fly, because driving is dangerous too. So is mountain-climbing.
Please review the debate in comments before commenting. Pretty good debate.
Huemer systematically addresses the justifications that have been articulated for political authority over the centuries, from hypothetical social contract theory to consequentialism and everything in between. I will give away the punchline by noting that his arguments would appear to fatally damage all of them.
Political philosophers generally start by attempting to construct a complete moral framework within which they justify their positions. Huemer takes an entirely different approach. He does not assume that we all agree on a single universal moral framework. He only assumes that most of us generally share similar moral intuitions about certain sorts of situations in the average case. (The strongest sort of assumption he demands is that his reader agree that beating people up without provocation is usually bad.)
Because he demands that the reader agree with him on so few things and so weakly, Huemer’s argument gains enormous strength, since there is no need to accept an all-encompassing ethical theory to believe the rest of his arguments.
Half of those surveyed…said they had trouble finding recent graduates qualified to fill positions at their company or organization. Nearly a third gave colleges just fair to poor marks for producing successful employees. And they dinged bachelor’s-degree holders for lacking basic workplace proficiencies like adaptability, communication skills, and the ability to solve complex problems.
As I have said here many times, a Liberal Arts education is not job training. It's designed to be about life-enrichment and about molding civilized and thoughtful citizens with deeper understanding of the world and of their own civilization than secondary schools can offer.
If people want job credentials, I'd advise majoring in Medieval History, Classics, or Renaissance Literature, and minoring in Accounting, Engineering, hard sciences, or Econ (or the other way around) - combining the life-enhancement with the utilitarian.
The kids should consider this: anything that can be learned just as well at The Great Courses/Teaching Company should not be studied at great expense in college. With all the alternative ways of learning higher ed material nowadays, spending big bucks for it makes no sense. And if you need a class and exams to provide the discipline, then one should work on one's discipline.
You can obtain a top-notch Liberal Arts education with them, with as much breadth or depth as you desire. I eagerly await the day that the company will offer their courses for college credit.
An excerpt from The Song of Hiawatha:
How to Identify
As you know, every storm, drought, plague, meteor shower, volcanic eruption and earthquakian upheaval is because of your neighbor's SUV. Curse his ragged hide.
By recreational drugs, I mean everything from pot to crystal meth and heroin.
Mead's post