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.
Professors are often put in an impossible position: Their students, regardless of IQ, typically have few actual academic skills when they arrive, and they know next to nothing substantive; yet they have an almost unassailable confidence in their belief that they are highly skilled and extensively knowledgeable. If a professor gives them honest feedback about the quality of what they produce, who would support him? The administration? The parents? The education school establishment? No, he would be on an island.
That is a lonely place, and it is expecting too much that more than a few outliers here and there would persevere. The students whom professors do care about are the small fraction who want to get Ph.D.s. Those students professors nurture. For all the other students, however, professors’ feelings tend to range from mild irritation to thinly veiled contempt.
But we cannot be too hard on the students, either. Ask even the serious ones what proportion of their classes they believe is actually worthwhile. Their answer: maybe 25 percent.
8:27 Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?"
8:28 And they answered him, "John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets."
8:29 He asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him, "You are the Messiah."
8:30 And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
8:31 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
8:32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
8:33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."
8:34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
8:35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.
8:36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?
Kayaked down the choppy and windy Hudson a piece from the charming, granola-feeling old river hamlet of Cold Spring, NY (which was packed with cheerful strolling, shopping, and eating people) then snuck under the Metro North Hudson Line bridge into Constitution Marsh just before the tide got too high to get under it.
They rent kayaks on the river. We rent kayaks. Kayaking on ordinary waters is easy for anybody. We did a good 4 hours. The rental guy said "Use your core, not your arms, and find your core rhythm." We are not proficient yet, but we sure enjoy it. The pros give the same advice for tennis, but I still use my arms. I have no core rhythm for anything.
Those hills are the Hudson Highlands, on the other (west) side of the river. Storm King. Dramatic. The Hudson there is still tidal, but low salinity. Can barely taste salt when you splash yourself.
Did not see a lot of migrants - no Teal yet. A migrant Harrier, Osprey, and some Spotted Sandpipers, a Sharpie, plus the resident Bald Eagles, Cormorants, Black Ducks, Mallards and herons (Great Blue and American).
A recurrent thought was that this must have been great for October and November duck hunting before the Audubon Society took it over. Good for Rail shooting too. The marsh is full of Wild Rice and Cattails. In the 1830s, some guy tried to make it a Wild Rice farm, hence the kayak routes and the abundance of Wild Rice.
No powerboats allowed. You could get lost in there if they did not have water-trail markers because it is a water maze. Good fun. We kayaked down to the southern lake, and visited the Audubon lodge there (and grabbed a coffee, chatted with the naturalist, and used their facilities).
If you kayak down the marsh around 40 minutes, you turn a corner and what do you see, across the marsh, across Constitution Island, and on the other side of the Hudson?
As I recall, George Washington picked that location. The big river is narrow and defensible there, due to Constitution Island poking into it.
Well they're not showing any lights tonight And there's no moon. There's just a hot blooded singer Singing 'Memphis in June' And they're beatin' the devil out of a guy Who's wearing a powder-blue wig. Later he'll be shot for Resisting arrest. I can still hear his voice crying In the wilderness. What looks large from a distance Close up ain't never that big.
From the new Bob interview in Rolling Stone, the interviewer had fits trying to get Bob to say he loved the O. Here's the best he could get out of him:
"He loves music. He's personable. He dresses good. What the fuck do you want me to say?"
...don’t worry, when your president’s so cool he’s doing gigs in Vegas, what happens in Tunis stays in Tunis.
As a Canadian, I’m interested to see that America has belatedly adopted the divided responsibilities of the Westminster system. Proceeding from the Pimp with the Limp show to Letterman to Beyoncé and back again, Barack Obama makes a perfectly adequate (if somewhat cheesy and downmarket) ceremonial queen.
Our experiment at civilizing the savage failed miserably in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will go on failing as often as we keep attempting it. And at the end of the experiment, there will be burning embassies and savages crying, "There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger", the same words that the bearded bandit who was one of the first Muslims and their many times great-grandfather was crying out as he was raping the shamelessly unveiled tribal woman who would become their many times great-grandmother.
"There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger" means that the Muslim need not waste time worrying about his conscience. His conscience is a Koran and that book says that he's entitled to kill any time that an infidel offends Islam by mocking his prophet, walking in front of him or building a skyscraper that is taller than a mosque. The Muslim need not waste time pondering the ethical implications of killing another human being to know that he is better than we are. His little black book assures him that he is better than us, that he has every right to kill us and that if he fails, he will be raping demon virgins who are so anorexic that their bones can be seen through their flesh.
But, we oh what good people we are, we will apologize for having an embassy and for having free speech and for getting our embassy in the way of their mob and our free speech in the way of our religious sensibilities.
...our media, terrified that their hero would be unmasked and themselves also then revealed as shallow and unworthy, focused their ire on Mitt Romney while the world burned, hoping that Romney had made a “gaffe” even when it was clear that his analysis, if not his timing, was correct.
Meanwhile, our government and its State Department have been revealed to be criminally negligent in the protection of their own people.
The roots of this negligence are a willed ignorance of the realities of the Middle East.
How all occasions do inform against me, And spur my dull revenge! What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple Of thinking too precisely on the event, A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom And ever three parts coward, I do not know Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do;’ Sith I have cause and will and strength and means To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me: Witness this army of such mass and charge Led by a delicate and tender prince, Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d Makes mouths at the invisible event, Exposing what is mortal and unsure To all that fortune, death and danger dare, Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw When honour’s at the stake. How stand I then, That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d, Excitements of my reason and my blood, And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men, That, for a fantasy and trick of fame, Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, Which is not tomb enough and continent To hide the slain? O, from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
By the time I was college-aged and supposed to be "finding myself," I didn't want to pursue a degree; I wanted to work. Instead of searching through course catalogs, I found a better-paying position with a large insurance company. At that time, the early 1990s, no one demanded that I have a degree or even wondered how young I was. (I'm guessing because it was illegal to ask.) Someone in Human Resources put me in a temp spot, and before long, I had a permanent job followed by a promotion. It took me a while, and working for a few small businesses, before I finally found my true calling, newspapers, but by the time I became a weekly reporter, I already had ten years' office experience, at just 24 years old.
In Psychiatry today there is much discussion, debate, and confusion about diagnosing the varieties of serious mood or attitudinal instability (ie instability which is life-disrupting in some significant way).
It's not your grandfather's Bipolar Disorder anymore. The numbers of people labelled as "Bipolar spectrum" has increased dramatically, for better or worse, in recent years. It may be "diagnosis creep," or it might be better understanding. A complicating factor is the overlap between Bipolar Spectrum problems and Borderline Personality, discussed here, where flips in attitudes towards relationships (eg idealization and devaluation) can be prominent in both (along with volatility, grandiosity, hypersensitivity, rage and paranoia).
All of this mess can be treated. I have become a fan of Lamictal for mood instability and attitude shifts which do not rise to the level of full-blown Manic-Depression but which are well-outside the normal moods and shifts of daily life. Lamictal plus confrontational psychotherapy, and maybe an antidepressant.
It hardly matters, and I suspect that nobody cares much including FLOTUS, but it is interesting if true. (h/t Moonbattery.) It is claimed that Obama and ballet dancer Rahm hung out at "Man's Country."
Male dancers are not always gay - see Baryshnikov. Lots of talented guys dance for the money and the chicks.
Strassel: Mr. Romney, Trust Your Pants - Obama tells Americans the terrible things the Republican will do to them. The Republican remains silent about what he would do.
...that aging rock star will win this campaign going away if Romney keeps playing it safe. That is a terrible waste for Republicans, an ominous sign for a country in desperate need of new leadership, and more than enough reason for me to stop bothering to tweet on Saturday nights.
The worst line in the clip you showed was this where she said there are different views around the world about the outer limits of free speech. Why is she engaging in a disquisition on free speech with the mob? The implication here that, perhaps the mob is right, that we ought to be suppressing anything that offends Islam, this is a nation where somebody puts a crucifix in bottle of urine and it ends up in a museum. We allow all kind of expression. But perhaps we ought to make an exception in the case of Islam. This is absurd. She ought to be speaking to the heads of state, to the State Department equivalents in other states and saying ‘You speak to your mob and talk to them and defend the embassy.’ This is return to statement a few days ago, I think and they are totally in meltdown at the State Department.”
...to a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.
I doubt that it is widely true that young women have become the sexual exploiters and predators, but I know it is true to some extent.
When I was about to graduate from high school as an amiable screw-off, ranked barely above the lower quarter of my class, my father, who had not gone to college, told me that if I wished to go he would pay my way, but he encouraged me to consider whether my going wouldn’t be a waste of time. He personally thought I might make a hell of a good salesman, which was a compliment, for he was himself a hell of a good salesman, and a successful one. I eschewed his advice, not because it wasn’t sound, but chiefly because I felt that, at 18, I wasn’t ready to go out in the world to work.
In those days, the University of Illinois was, at least for residents of the state, an open-enrollment school. If you lived in Illinois, the school had to take you, no matter how low in your high school class you graduated. Lots of kids flunked out, and my own greatest fear on the train headed from Chicago down to Champaign-Urbana, in white bucks and reading The Catcher in the Rye, was that I would be among them.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. For today, we'll (semi-ironically) adopt the Democratic Socialist Party's meme: We didn't build Maggie's Farm on our own.
We rely on the geniuses who made the intertunnels possible, the engineers who provide us with our coal- and nuclear-energy, on the geniuses who invented the hyperlink and YouTube, on our Webmeister who keeps this rickety site functioning with duct tape and baling wire, on hundreds of other bloggers, websites, and news sources for content, on our commenters who add zip, on Dunkin Donuts which keeps us going, on Panasonic who built my Lumix, etc etc - and on our readers and the good folks who link to us.
It's a communal effort, and an enjoyable one. Many farm hands make light(er) work. No government involvement or funds, however.
This is our biannual request that our readers pitch in and give us a hand by sending out the word about our eclectic, informative, and politically-Centrist/Libertarian website. As I always say, our readership is our reward for what we do here.
Pic of the Maggie's Farm hard-working back office farm hands - and fact-checkers (Zachriel missed the photo op) - safely below the fold.
I should not be surprised that the shocking, shocking headline news of the past 48 hours has not been lethal Islamist attacks on American embassies, but Mitt Romney's comments about these barbarian atrocities.
I learned about 
Summer is slowly ending up here. Carpe diem. We're kayaking on the upper Hudson River this morning.
Paestum 