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.
Until the Newtown horror, the three worst K–12 school shootings ever had taken place in either Britain or Germany.
and
Economists John Lott and William Landes conducted a groundbreaking study in 1999, and found that a common theme of mass shootings is that they occur in places where guns are banned and killers know everyone will be unarmed, such as shopping malls and schools.
I sometimes wonder whether black Americans would be happy or disappointed to know how little most white Americans think about race. And more and more, I think they’d be disappointed. Or mad.
Sipp makes the case that life is accumulated error. Lots of truth in that. Even small errors in facts, in choices, in judgement, build on eachother and you eventually you can have a mess that you drag along with you. It's difficult in life to start on a clean slate.
In Maritime Academies, they always teach the famous case of the cargo ship leaving NY harbor headed for Brazil in the 1960s. After a day at sea, the ship beached itself on Fire Island on Long Island, NY. The autopilot, as today, was controlled by a gyro. When a gyro malfunctions and drifts, everything checks out and agrees with the malfunctioning gyro. When the ship hit the beach, the crew had no idea where they were. Degree by degree, over three watches, the ship had made a 180. I'll assume they hit the beach at night.
Well, everything checks out as consistent - unless somebody bothers to check the heading against an old-fashioned magnetic compass. There is a reason all ships still carry a sextant and a copy of Bowditch too.
...the animating principle of the modern university is a focus on the image and “brand” of the university, rather than the underlying substance of the education experience received. Governance of the modern university is almost completely absorbed by how to market the school’s brand rather than how to improve its underlying quality. The focus of every discussion is what impact a particular action (or inaction) will have on the school’s brand.
I do not care for vodka in any form other than in a Bloody Mary or its variants, no matter what our team member Opie says about Grey Goose: I think it's just ethanol with a twist. (To me, a vodka Martini is only suited for auto fuel for the sanctimonious feel-gooders.)
At Maggie's Farm, we are feel-gooders of the other variety. While it's not a strictly holiday drink, I seem to only have Bloody Marys in the winter. Besides Irish Coffee, it's the only drink a proper gent can have before noon without looking like a drunk.
There are about a thousand different Bloody Mary recipes. Here's an interesting one. I used to have our wonderful Connecticut Yankee neighbor William F. Buckley Jr's recipe, which included canned beef broth or consomme and sounded like a complete wholesome meal in a glass - protein, vegetables, roughage (the celery stick) and booze - but I can't find it. (Thanks, reader. You remind me that some folks call that a Bloody Bull, but I'd still like to find his recipe - it obviously worked well for him.)
The Bloody Caesar (or plain "Caesar"), I learned recently, is the most popular mixed drink in Canada. It must be all that clam broth that makes Canadians so "nice." It could not be more simple, because the magic is in the magical Mott's Clamato. Rimming the glass with some lime and salt is a delicious touch and also wards off the dread Scurvy. I like the Spicy Clamato more than the regular. Here's the history of Clamato - one of Canada's great contributions to civilization, second only to the Labrador Retriever.
On most days, I'd take the Caesar over the Mary or the Bull. We olde Cape Codders cannot get away from that clam broth, which was Mother's milk to us ever since the kind Indians taught our ancestors how to dig the tasty quahogs.
Addendum: Opie doesn't want our readers to forget the Bloody Maria
I am pleased that we posted on Father Rohr this morning. I have no interest in posting on the topic of dramatic mass murders on this site, because I have already said all I have to say about it already on previous postings.
Dramatic or undramatic, evil is pervasive. There is not a single human heart without some. We read about guns, mental illness, government policy, a bad culture, inattentive parents and others, etc. These are all distractions. The relevant topic is human evil in all of its forms. We do not like to think about that.
Believe it or not, I saw a headline saying "Gun kills 26 in Connecticut."
A planet without humans would be a planet without good and evil. The utopian narrative goes something like this: "If everybody is properly served, controlled, treated, drugged, provided for, etc etc, horrible things might be eliminated from the world." That thought is truly crazy and is the reason we have trademarked the term "psycho-utopianism" on this website.
In more ways than one, we are waiting in darkness. Isaiah prophesied Jesus’ birth, saying, “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:2).
Yet, the darkness will never totally go away. I’ve worked long enough in ministry to know that moral evil isn’t going to disappear, but the Gospel offers something much more subtle and helpful: “the light shines on the inside of the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it” (John 1:5). Such is the Christian form of yin-yang, our own belief in paradox and mystery.
We must all hope and work to eliminate darkness, especially in many of the great social issues of our time. We wish world hunger could be eliminated. We wish we could stop wasting the earth’s resources on armaments. We wish we could stop killing people from womb to tomb.
But at a certain point, we have to surrender to the fact that the darkness is part of reality, and my logical mind does not know why. But the only real question becomes how to trust the light, receive the light, and spread the light. That is not a capitulation to evil any more than the cross was a capitulation to evil. It is real transformation into the unique program of the Crucified and Risen Christ. This is the one pattern that redeems reality instead of punishing evil or thinking we can eliminate it entirely. Our main job is to face it in ourselves.
Adapted from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr
My pic is the Congregational Church of Hadlyme, CT, yesterday
Buddy's Comment: Miller was 14 years old, maybe 15, here, sez the comments. Rogers was a big star already, at 26, and let the kid have the part in the movie, and also let her steal this scene. Watch the micro moves in that under-a-minute span from 1:00 to 1:50 -
- A Mathematician, a Biologist and a Physicist are sitting in a street cafe watching people going in and coming out of the house on the other side of the street. First they see two people going into the house. Time passes. After a while they notice three persons coming out of the house. The Physicist: "The measurement wasn't accurate.". The Biologist: "They have reproduced". The Mathematician: "If now exactly one person enters the house then it will be empty again."
- A doctor, a lawyer, and a mathematician were having a conversation about the relative benefits of wives and mistresses.
The doctor insisted that, from a health perspective, it was far better to have a wife. He talked about stress, relaxation, routine, and other factors.
The lawyer contended that it was better to have a mistress, because that way you retain more of your legal rights, she doesn't own half your property, and so forth.
The mathematician said that he could see both sides of that argument, but really he thought it was best to have both.
"Both?", the doctor and the lawyer exclaimed. "Why?"
"Sure, both. That way, when the wife thinks you're with the mistress, and the mistress thinks you're with the wife, you can sneak off by yourself and do mathematics."
In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist:
This past spring, Harvard and MIT got the attention of everyone in the higher ed business when they announced a new online education venture called edX. The new venture will make online versions of the universities’ courses available to a virtually unlimited number of enrollees around the world. Think of the ramifications: Now anyone in the world with an internet connection can access the kind of high-level teaching and scholarship previously available only to a select group of the best and most privileged students.
Evil exists, does terrible damage in this world and in this life, but is conquered, overcome, in the final end.
The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir. h/t Dr. Bob, who is mostly on blog sabbatical. I am not too big on praise songs, but this one will not harm you too much.
... it is more than slightly ironic that Democrats, the fiercely pro-choice party, reserve free choice for aborting a fetus while denying it for such matters as choosing your child’s school or joining a union.
Well, I have never heard of a "national curriculum." The very idea of that creeps me out. Parents and local schools ought to be entirely competent to figure out what sorts of readings are good for primary school. It's not rocket science.
My larger point, however, is that parents can and should guide their kids' reading. If you turn off or throw out the TV, get rid of computer games, most kids with any intelligence or curiosity will read anything at hand. Even "informational texts." Sometimes people talk as if "curricula" is where learning begins and ends. Thank God, it is not.
This might be of interest if you're into uploading or downloading large files. In my case, I don't have a TV so I download my few weekly shows from Usenet a few days afterward. They're high-res and usually about a gig in size. Likewise, when I upload a 1-hour documentary to one of my web sites, they're also often a gig in size. Since I'm using a slow Verizon Wireless connection, this can take some serious time, like three or four hours.
And during that time, because I'm doing other things on the computer, I might suddenly need to reboot. Hence the problem.
Below the fold I'll reveal what I know about continuing stopped uploads and downloads. I recently made a fascinating discovery about Firefox that I wanted to pass along. Unlike Internet Exploder, it can actually continue broken downloads, but, naturally, there's a trick to it.
Of course, current colleges (at current rates!) are not necessarily delivering much bang for the buck either: According to Richard Arum and Josipha Roksa, authors of the 2011 book Academically Adrift, 36 percent of college students fail to “show any significant improvement over four years” as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment.
In my view, expressed frequently here, the higher ed bubble is a result of the democratization of the higher ed industry. Colleges, designed for scholars, compete for "customers," standards drop, and prices rise to whatever level the market, subsidies, and student loans can bear. A degree is a mass market product, which means that the customer must be kept happy. That represents a complete reversal of historical approaches.
I spoke with a recent state college grad who told me that he never read a book in four years. He told me he mainly got by on what he had learned in high school. I think many people are not aware of how low expectations have dropped outside of the elite schools and non-elite STEM programs.
There must be thousands of profs out there who are teaching well-below their levels of competence due to the requirement to dumb down their efforts.
Underlying all of these issues is a simple fact: learning is not something that can be "delivered," something you "get" or can buy. The life of the mind cannot be bought. It can be ignited, but not bought. A degree can be bought today, but its economic value today as a mass-market product, and its price, are out of sync.
From my doc and from my reading, I think it is fairly well-established that total cholesterol levels have little directly to do with cardiovascular disease, but perhaps LDLs do (LDL bad, HDL good, supposedly, and all more heavily genetically-determined than dietarily).
Dietary LDL may or may not have a meaningful impact on cardiovascular disease. For what it's worth, LDLs are found in poultry (even lean poultry skinned), all dairy, fish, shellfish, and red meat. Docs like to recommend salmon because it helps HDLs. Heck, it's all theoretical, but I do like salmon (with the right LDL-laden sauce, of course).
In my view, obsessing about food is neurotic, and it's Christmastime too. Who would go to a party where they served "healthy" crap? Not me. Just take your damn Lipitor, skip the carbs, hope for the best, and live it up.
Eggnog must surely be evil because it tastes good, but I do not know a doc at my club who will turn it down. We make it with Wild Turkey bourbon, fluffed eggwhites floating on the top, with tons of freshly-grated nutmeg abundantly on top of that. The recipe we use is very close to this. (That article also has a brief history of Eggnog. Rum is in fact more traditional in Eggnog than bourbon whiskey, but I prefer it with bourbon.)
Traditional New England clubs always put out a bowl of eggnog every cocktail hour between Advent and New Year's Day. We chill it with a block of ice in the middle of the punch bowl, but it can be served just as made without chilling it. My family has traditionally made it a little too strong, but without some booze who would want to drink pre-cooked scrambled eggs? Still, it's really all about the freshly-grated nutmeg.
In the (deep) South, they make Milk Punch. I've never had that.
What are our readers' favorite Eggnog concoctions? Or do you just pick up a half-gallon of the pre-made at the store?
I heard another nightmare story when it comes to domain names the other day. This was emailed to me by an old buddy:
Hey, dude -
My girlfriend was going to start up a blog site a few days ago and found out her "name.com" was already taken. It wasn't when she tested it out about a month ago. Is there somebody out there keeping track of these things and selling them to those companies that collect domain names?
As an experienced professional in the field, my experienced, professional answer was that I didn't have a clue.
But, as I've preached here in the past, why take the chance? These things are dirt cheap ($5/mo) and you don't actually have to do anything to the domain to preserve it (like build a web site), so I advocate getting it now before someone else does. You'll only have yourself to kick later on if you don't.
For hosting companies, I highly recommend BlueHost. It's owned by a good conservative family out in Provo, Utah. The CEO's twice-yearly emails are a laff riot, and very critical of current governmental policy. There's no sign-up fee and no early cancellation fee. Also, the cost of the actual domain name is free, unlike some hosting companies which charge up to 35 bucks for it.
Even if you're not going to use it for twenty years until it's finally time to post pics of the grandkids, get it now. There's only one 'yourname.com' out there, and once it's gone, it's gone forever.
Speaking of grandkids, below the fold I'll elaborate on the private 'family blog', and what a blast they are. I have two great stories to tell.
This is, if you call my causing an 84-year-old man to openly weep, 'great'.
Labor needs representation and many of the values that drew millions of working Americans into the labor movement endure. But few American institutions are as ill suited to the 21st century or have proved so inept at reorganization and reform as the unions.
President Obama's tenure as president will have as one of its benchmarks one of the worst and longest-running unemployment records in recent history -- and he will own it all by himself.
Edward Prescott has shown that the U.S. average marginal effective tax rate is around 40%. This means that if the average worker earns $100 from additional output, he will be able to consume only an additional $60.
"Ted Dalrymple" (Dr. Anthony Daniels) is, as readers know, a retired Brit Psychiatrist with experience in the prison system (as a physician, not as an inmate).
With or without prison experience, Psychiatrists, priests, and police officers have the experience to view people with a jaundiced eye, knowing perhaps better than most about what dark thoughts and motives lurk in the human soul because they are not in denial about the nature of human selfishness, deception and self-deception, envy, manipulativeness, sin, and evil.
In A Word to the Wise, Dalrymple questions the very premise of the idea of "man's inhumanity to man," from the Poles' treatment of their Jews to the modern British welfare state.
Spam University
Sipp makes the case that 
I do not care for vodka in any form other than in a Bloody Mary or its variants, no matter what our team member Opie says about Grey Goose: I think it's just ethanol with a twist. (To me, a vodka Martini is only suited for auto fuel for the sanctimonious feel-gooders.) 
COME EMMANUEL, GOD WITH US! 
Vanderleun: 
This might be of interest if you're into uploading or downloading large files. In my case, I don't have a TV so I download my few weekly shows from 
This "Lost Generation" 
From my doc and from my reading, I think it is fairly well-established that total cholesterol levels have little directly to do with cardiovascular disease, but perhaps 
Peaceable Kingdom: Cart pulled by lion, two sheep, and a bear. More cart pics