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.
Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake. My house was on a cliff. The thing could take Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row. Then the long pause and then the bigger shake. It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
And far too large for my feet to step by. I hoped that various buildings were brought low. The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
It seemed quite safe till she got up and dressed. The guarded tourist makes the guide the test. Then I said The Garden? Laughing she said No. Taxi for her and for me healthy rest. It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
The language problem but you have to try. Some solid ground for lying could she show? The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
None of these deaths were her point at all. The thing was that being woken he would bawl And finding her not in earshot he would know. I tried saying Half an Hour to pay this call. It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
I slept, and blank as that I would yet lie. Till you have seen what a threat holds below, The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
It seemed quite safe till she got up and dressed. The guarded tourist makes the guide the test. Then I said The Garden? Laughing she said No. Taxi for her and for me healthy rest. It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
The language problem but you have to try. Some solid ground for lying could she show? The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
Tell me again about Europe and her pains, Who’s tortured by the drought, who by the rains. Glut me with floods where only the swine can row Who cuts his throat and let him count his gains. It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
A bedshift flight to a Far Eastern sky. Only the same war on a stronger toe. The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
Tell me more quickly what I lost by this, Or tell me with less drama what they miss Who call no die a god for a good throw, Who say after two aliens had one kiss It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
But as to risings, I can tell you why. It is on contradiction that they grow. It seemed the best thing to be up and go. Up was the heartening and the strong reply. The heart of standing is we cannot fly.
An aubade is a morning-after love song. Empson presumably wrote this for/about his Japanese lover while he was teaching in Japan. Was Empson eccentric? Certainly, but no more so than other poets. He was a poet's poet, but his strength was in wriiting about writing. His 7 Types of Ambiguity is a classic.
Who would give up the Iliad for the “real” historical record? Of course the writer has a responsibility, whether as solemn interpreter or satirist, to make a composition that serves a revealed truth. But we demand that of all creative artists, of whatever medium. Besides which a reader of fiction who finds, in a novel, a familiar public figure saying and doing things not reported elsewhere knows he is reading fiction. He knows the novelist hopes to lie his way to a greater truth than is possible with factual reportage. The novel is an aesthetic rendering that would portray a public figure interpretively no less than the portrait on an easel. The novel is not read as a newspaper is read; it is read as it is written, in the spirit of freedom.
Picasso expressed the same idea summarily: “Art is the lie that helps us to see the truth.”
I spoke with Rep. Todd Akin on Thursday night and here is his response to this smear by President Obama.
“He’s good at personal attacks but bad at attacking problems. He uses the same solution on every problem – that is more government and more and more and more debt. Obamacare has taken over one-sixth of the economy and the government has pushed private lenders out of student loans. Now they’re creating the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac of student loans. And as the government takes it over, more and more debt is created. The reason Obama is upset about use of the word socialism is because his administration is asserting the government into what was once private sector areas. The reason Obama is attacking me is that I don’t have the same faith in big government as he does.”
A woman and a baby were in the doctor's examining room, waiting for the doctor to come in for the baby's first exam. The doctor arrived, and examined the baby, checked his weight, and being a little concerned, asked if the baby was breast-fed or bottle-fed.
'Breast-fed, ' she replied..
'Well, strip down to your waist,' the doctor ordered.
She did. He pinched her nipples, pressed, kneaded, and rubbed both breasts for a while in a very professional and detailed examination.
Motioning to her to get dressed, the doctor said, ' No wonder this baby is underweight. You don't have any milk. '
‘I know,' she said, 'I'm his Grandma, But I'm glad I came.’
The story of Newark, New Jersey is a classic of the Northeast's Blue City woes with corrupt, plunder-oriented politicians, corrupt and greedy unions, the Mafia, unskilled blacks from the South coming for industrial opportunities which disappeared, drugs and drug gangs, welfare, white flight - all of it.
You can see the same sad story in Bridgeport, CT, Camden, NJ, or Hartford, CT. Newark Mayor Cory Booker has sought the chance to turn things around.
Is Booker a Don Quixote or a Rudy Giuliani? Time will tell.
They should be protesting the federal debt they are facing, instead of the debt they freely took upon themselves in an effort to improve their prospects in life. Apparently higher education does not instill emotional maturity.
I am asked to do a brief post about Disability and have been sent a couple of links. "Disability," as in our Social Security Disability welfare program, is one about which I have unpleasant feelings which some might view as cruel. I prefer to view it as Tough Love.
However, it comes from experience. The fact is that I will not consult with anybody on Disability, nor will I participate in anybody's Disability application unless they are in a coma, severely brain-damaged, or the like. Can people with (treated) schizophrenia work, be useful, and maintain some dignity? Of course they can. Every patient of mine with schizophrenia works, except for one housewife.
Here are my reasons for that, from a psychiatric standpoint:
1. Nobody with a treated mental problem is incapable of doing something useful 2. Helping a patient obtain Disability is a way of saying that you have given up on their future 3. Many people on Disability give up on making a life, and just mope around for years 4. I see people with severe disabilities working all sorts of jobs, maintaining their pride and independence 5. The scam component is huge, I believe: free money. I've seen it plenty of times. I even get spam emails weekly inviting me to fill out a form for Disability lawyers: "Find out if you're entitled." Also, lots of people with Disability seem to work off the books.
Few people have any idea of how easy it is to get on Disability these days. Here is one of the links: Workers Comp. and Unemployment
On June 1, 2001, a Palestinian terrorist killed 21 young people, and wounded 132 others, in a discotheque in Tel Aviv. The terrorist was heralded by Hamas and Islamic Jihad as one of their own, and his family rewarded by the Palestinian Authority. Shortly after the attack, the graffiti appeared near the discotheque, “They won’t stop us from dancing.”
Thursday, April 26, is the 64th birthday of Israel, still dancing. Indeed, if there were a “Dancing With The Stars” competition for countries, Israel would win for its remarkable, seemingly miraculous successes in all fields of endeavor against all odds during its creation and 64 years, combined with the spirit that keeps striving for improvement and for peace with intractable enemies.
There’s a new journalism prize, The Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Mendacity. PJ Media and The New Criterion will award the Prize annually “for what our readers consider the most egregious example of dishonest reporting for the fiscal year.” The initial judges include Peter Collier, Roger Kimball, Cliff May, Ron Radosh, Glenn Reynolds, Claudia Rosett, and Roger L. Simon. Roger Simon writes, “Since this is a new prize the committee also solicits your suggestions on how we should carry on our work and any other suggestions regarding the Walter Duranty Prize.”
There’s certainly enough expertise on the panel to reach such a choice. I suggest the following criteria:
1.In parallel to the reportage by Walter Duranty, the prize for dishonest reporting should be reporting on a foreign country. Walter Duranty’s infamous whitewashing of the starvation and death of millions of Ukrainians in 1932-3 will be hard to exceed, but there are enough terrible instances of widespread state brutality today that journalists who espouse the state line or distort the facts should be the priority.
2.In parallel to the reportage by Walter Duranty, the prize for dishonest reporting should be to a bureau chief for a major news agency, newspaper, or other prominent media, as Walter Duranty was the longtime bureau chief in Moscow for the New York Times. This ties the responsibility directly to the owners of the venue.
3.In parallel to the reportage by Walter Duranty, the prize for dishonest reporting should be the recipient of an award for journalism, as Walter Duranty was of the Pulitzer Prize for his. This ties the responsibility to the journalism profession.
Susan Squire, the author of a forthcoming history of marriage called I Don’t, told me that marriage wasn’t made to handle all the sexual pressure we’re putting on it. For one thing, the average life span is far greater than it was 100 years ago; what is marriage to do with all that time? And in days gone by, marriage was a more formal institution whose purposes were breeding and family. Squire says that cultural standards of morality have changed dramatically. In ancient aristocracies, rich men had courtesans for pleasure and concubines for quick sex. In the Victorian age, prostitution was far more open than it is today. America is a special case. By the early-twentieth century, she says, the combined impact of egalitarian ideals and the movies had burdened American marriage with a new responsibility: providing romantic love forever. Squire says that the first couples therapy began cropping up in the thirties, when people found their marriages weren’t measuring up to cultural expectations.
With mashed potato minds fresh from the psychological Cuisinart of public schools, the next generation in line to inherit the most fantastically schizophrenic nation in history will be like candy for social engineers; utterly unequipped for the mission.
Well, the answer seems obvious to me. Liberal Fascism. The authoritarian, or totalitarian, streak in the Left has always been there, and always will be.
From Prof. Johnson's piece:
What will it take for wider outrage to emerge? We've already had a case of an innocent student (Caleb Warner) expelled from school under the preponderance-of-evidence standard, as the AP article mentioned. But to my knowledge no congressional Democrats or liberal columnists commented on the Warner case. And so, I suppose, we'll continue to wait, and be told that issues of campus due process and civil liberties haven't popped up in recent years.
NY Times Public Editor: The Times' Coverage of Obama Has Been More Favorable Than Any Recent President; It's Time For A Skeptical Look At Obama and His Record
Joel Kotkin: The Great California Exodus - A leading U.S. demographer and 'Truman Democrat' talks about what is driving the middle class out of the Golden State:
... the Golden State's fastest-growing entity is government and its biggest product is red tape. The first thing that comes to many American minds when you mention California isn't Hollywood or tanned girls on a beach, but Greece. Many progressives in California take that as a compliment since Greeks are ostensibly happier. But as Mr. Kotkin notes, Californians are increasingly pursuing happiness elsewhere.
Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.
Are we allowed to make them clean their rooms? How about mowing the lawn? My kids have split wood, stacked wood, mowed fields, cleared brush, cleaned the bathroom.
Spent a couple of hours on the Connecticut coast this weekend. A vast swath of Common Slipper Shells had washed up during winter storms, a couple of feet deep. People don't eat this mollusc.
(These limpets are different from the European Common Limpet.)
They attach themselves to rocks and other hard objects. Also, to eachother. They move, extremely slowly, if they want to. I tried to figure out whether they have any predators. Supposedly some crabs can eat them, and some of those little snails can bore holes into them. I wonder whether diving ducks can pry them off their attachments, as they do with mussels.
Bob Dylan
, by Peter Atkins and 
, by Paul Feyerabend
Miracles Do Happen: 
College students protest debt on "Trillion Dollar Day"
That pic of a Texas tan-line is going around
There’s a new journalism prize, 
More on 