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.
Why are Republicans so reluctant to name the victims of Democrat
policies, particularly the victims among America’s minority communities
and working classes? Why don’t Republicans identify Democrats as a
threat to those communities as Cuomo declared Republicans a threat to
women? How can you win a war when the other side is using bazookas and
your side is using fly swatters?
Defending the victims of job destroyers is morally and emotionally
stronger than defending rich “job creators.” It creates sympathy and
arouses anger. It inspires concerns about justice. It’s how the
Democrats’ recruit and energize their troops. It’s the way — the only
way — Republicans can neutralize the Democrats’ attacks on them as
defenders of the rich, and return their fire: by framing them as the
enemies of working Americans and the middle class.
During Obama’s four years in office, African Americans – middle-class
African Americans – lost half their net worth as a result of the
collapse of the housing market. That’s one hundred billion dollars in
personal assets that disappeared from the pockets of African Americans
because of a 25-year Democratic campaign to remove loan requirements
for homebuyers. Yet in 2012, Republicans were too polite to mention
this!
The fingerprints of Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and
Barney Frank were all over the subprime mortgage crisis. The campaign to
remove loan requirements for African American and other minority
borrowers started with Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act. It
snookered thousands of poor black and Hispanic Americans into buying
homes they couldn’t afford, which they then lost. How traumatic is the
loss of one’s home?
By securitizing the failed mortgages, Democratic bundlers on Wall
Street who had poured $100 million into the 2008 Obama campaign made
tens of millions off the misery of those who lost their homes. In other
words, with the help of Clinton, Frank and Obama, Wall Street Democrats
made massive profits off the backs of poor black and Hispanic Americans.
But Republicans were too polite to mention it. Here was a missed
opportunity to neutralize Democrat attacks on Republicans as the party
of the rich and exploiters of the poor. It was an opportunity to drive a
giant wedge through the Democratic base.
The bottom line is this: If Republicans want to persuade minorities
they care about them, they have to stand up for them; they have to
defend them; and they have to show them that Democrats are playing them
for suckers, exploiting them, oppressing them, and profiting from their
suffering.
From Michelle Rhee: My Break With the Democrats - As a lifelong Democrat, controversial education reformer Michelle Rhee never thought she’d support school vouchers. Until she did. InRadical, she details her transformation:
Here’s the question we Democrats need to ask ourselves: Are we beholden to the public school system at any cost, or are we beholden to the public school child at any cost? My loyalty and my duty will always be to the children.
Not everyone bought it. In fact, most of my Democrat friends remained adamantly opposed to vouchers. It was interesting, though: they were always opposed to the broad policy, but they could never reconcile their logic when thinking at the individual-kid level.
Sunny takes it to the sanctimonious, phony and manipulative emotional appeals. h/t, reader. Like we need celebs to feel terrible about the slaughter of children by satanic persons.
Long-time readers know that my experience teaches me that retirement is often a poor state of affairs for the average American male. Many deteriorate physically and mentally. I have one 92 year-old client who goes to the office every day after swimming a half-mile at the Y. Work keeps him young. He does indulge in 4 weeks of vacation travel each year, however, and has great-grandkids around the house all the time. Nice, balanced life. First wife died, now on his second but she is not doing too well now.
A beautiful life, really, although he is not wealthy. He still has a mortgage, which I think is a smart thing to have. Bought his current home for $37,000, now has a $200,000 mortgage on it and it is worth around $700,000. today.
I have been updating his will and trusts for over 25 years, when he first thought he was getting old.
As I have often said, there is no useful general definition of happiness. Unhappiness and misery are much more easily defined.
Do all people need a sense of mission or purpose to be "happy" - other than the basic mission of survival and comfort? I very much doubt it. The wonderful psychiatrist Victor Frankl was indeed sustained by his search for meaning in the camps, but that is far from ordinary life and he was far from an ordinary man.
For me, contentment is a good, loyal husband, a good love life, good work, enjoyable if sometimes difficult kids, good friends and good acquaintances, exciting hobbies and sports, integrity and a clean conscience, a dog, a relationship with God, and books to read. Changing the world is a fool's errand for crazy people and narcissists who do not want to focus on the substance of their own brief lives. Can't do without them, though. Part of the fabric.
It's a major issue. Everybody is a criminal. I am willing to guarantee it. Nobody has read the million pages of federal regs and codes, and no citizen can understand them. A defendant is anybody the feds or the DA want to be one. Nobody is innocent, no matter how hard they try to be.
Is this a Walleye, a Pickerel, or a Pike? (Photo below the fold)
I am looking forward to Opening Day.
I am not a skier and I do not play paddle, so this season between the end of my hunting season and freshwater Opening Day is lacking in outdoor fun. I can think about, and prep for, Opening Day for trout, which is in April. Regarding the photo, I have been soaked but happy fishing too.
I have never caught a mermaid yet. What's the best mermaid bait, Capt. Tom? OK, never mind.
13:1 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
13:2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
13:3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
13:4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant
13:5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
13:6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
13:7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
13:8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.
13:9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part;
13:10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.
13:11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.
13:12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.
13:13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
I have to confess that I'm a person who far prefers playing almost any sport badly to watching other people do it well. When I was in grad school, we had the best "touch" - read "shove very hard so the guy falls in the mud" - football games, weekly. A joy. Being quick and agile then, I was usually a runner (and a ball-dropper). That football is a slippery bugger.
Since every TV sports fan in the US is either hosting or attending a party today (any excuse for a party, or for buying a new big screen), and because I do like to make and eat chicken wings, I offer Alton Brown's very good Buffalo Chicken Wing instructions.
As usual with Alton, the show is a kick - and educational - even if you don't care about the recipe.
For Alton, everything simple is an adventure. Great production.
Our editor has been inspiring with food this winter.
My serious girlfriend and I are having a little dinner party for 12 friends tonight. Acquaintances with whom we feel we would like to be better friends, and who could enrich our life.
Building new friendships as a couple is a complicated dance, isn't it? Do I enjoy their company? Do they think I'm boring, or a jerk? Do they wonder what I am doing with her, or she with me? You never know unless they call you back to do something after you have extended your hand in friendship.
Whether formally or informally, inviting people into your humble abode for supper is generally a social signal of warm and positive feelings unless it involves business. No space at my kitchen table, so will need my whole humble Lower East Side 1 BR apartment for seating. Who cares, if it's a good time?
I had braised (Massachusetts White-Tail) venison shoulder and various scraps in the crock pot all day yesterday, and later we'll whip up some cheese grits for a side and reheat the stew. About 8 lbs. of meat. I agree that stews are always better a day later.
We're having people who never ate a Bambi before. Actually, it's from a sweet-tasting and tender doe I bowed last month up at the Bird Dog homestead, but I will not mention that. Baguette to sop up the juice. A relatively cheap California cabernet, and good beers for the beer people. I am too cheap and modest to pay for some good Burgundies.
Then a tiny scoop of mango sorbet with a mint sprig on it.
After that, the Stinky Cheese Board (thanks, Fairway cheese man) with fruit, dried fruit, and nuts, for dessert or, I suppose, a savoury. Fig preserves and walnutty French breads to accompany the cheeses which have been out of the fridge all day to soften up. Bottle of nice port that my Dad gave me for Christmas, for those who enjoy Sunday morning headaches.
Entertaining people with whom you want friendship is easy, the Maggie's Farm Way. The secret ingredients, it seems to me, are not food, decor, or fancy homes or restaurants, but intelligent people with interesting and varied interests, charming gals, lively conversation, controversial topics, and snappy repartee. It requires just one or two people who are willing to rise to the occasion to be the life of the party without over-drinking. I will do that if nobody else will, but I'd rather leave that to others.
The meaning of tasty or interesting food is to honor guests who take the trouble to come to your place.
I stumbled into this interesting, somewhat scholarly essay: WHAT IS RELIGION? by Prof. Thomas A. Idinopulos. A quote:
...take the case of Theravada Buddhism. Here is a something called "religion" which is not a religion. Although Theravada Buddhism is usually included in any book on the world's religions, it is not theistic, recognizes no sacred being or beings, and does not officially encourage worship of Buddha or any "higher being" (despite popular veneration of the Buddha-ideal). Theravada Buddhism appears to be a technique or program for human self-purification or self-fulfillment or self-negation. If the word religion is attached to Theravada Buddhism, it must be done so loosely as to allow the differences from other religions to prevail.
What then are we to do about the books like those of the late Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and more recently Huston Smith, that stress the similarities of religion? Such works will always be in demand because human beings want to believe that there is an inner core of common religious meaning that provides an intelligible unifying structure of meaning to the bewildering multiplicity of world religions. No matter how much we stress the differences among religions, the public desire for assurance about religious unity will inspire authors to continue to invent overarching pseudo-philosophical categories like "Eternal Wisdom," "Universal Spirit," or "Cosmic Soul," and promote them as the "truth" to which the various religions point. Perhaps there is a universal religious truth and perhaps there is not. If there is, however, I believe we should look for it not in what a religion asserts as truth but in how it asserts its truth. As we shall see in discussing W. C. Smith's ideas, it is form not content that religions have in common.
There are other problems in comparing religions...
I don't know how Theo got this pic of my new girlfriend on my fishing boat last summer, in Southington CT harbor. The cool, smart chicks seem to like me. I have no idea why.
When Two People Click - Finding a mate used to be a long quest to uncover a few worthy people, but dating sites now offer hundreds of potential mates at a keystroke.
I have come to the conclusion that current energy and climate policy is probably more dangerous, both economically and ecologically, than climate change itself. This is not the same as arguing that climate has not changed or that mankind is not partly responsible. That the climate has changed because of man-made carbon dioxide I fully accept. What I do not accept is that the change is or will be damaging, or that current policy would prevent it.
Mom came through the procedure despite her general frailty. Brand-new stainless steel hip. A little confusion from the morphine: "Where are my dogs?"
Thanks for your good wishes for the gal. Heading back over there this morning, then will make dinner for Dad. Making plans today to get her back into good shape at a joint rehab place in a couple of days.
Told my Dad we should get them twin beds at a rehab. He could definitely use 4 hrs of PT plus exercise and three squares daily, for a couple of weeks.
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory. 'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. So, till the judgment that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.
Long-time readers know that my experience teaches me that retirement is often a poor state of affairs for the average American male. Many deteriorate physically and mentally. I have one 92 year-old client who goes to the office every day after swimming a half-mile at the Y. Work keeps him young. He does indulge in 4 weeks of vacation travel each year, however, and has great-grandkids around the house all the time. Nice, balanced life. First wife died, now on his second but she is not doing too well now.
America's Baby Bust -
Maybe we all need to learn the hard way, but there is so little time to fail. It's a truism that we can learn more from failures than from successes. 
All you can do is laugh. 
I have to confess that I'm a person who far prefers playing almost any sport badly to watching other people do it well. When I was in grad school, we had the best "touch" - read "shove very hard so the guy falls in the mud" - football games, weekly. A joy. Being quick and agile then, I was usually a runner (and a ball-dropper). That football is a slippery bugger.
Our editor has been inspiring with food this winter. 
I don't know how