Tuesday, May 22. 2012
Like totally cool. A country cabin on the roof of a six-storey building, corner of 13th and 3rd just a few blocks from Union Square. They even have a Wisteria arbor up there. Rus in urba indeed.
We went to the CSC's production of Midsummer's Night Dream this weekend. It got some terrible reviews - and some very positive ones too. It was wonderful, and sexy.
Maggie's is a big supporter of CSC: "Reimagining the classics." They manage to get stars who want to do classic stage. Bebe Neuwirth was Tatiana.
"But what is the story line?", I asked the wise Mrs. BD.
"What fools these mortals be" she replied.
I am fortunate in spouse and friends who dislodge me from my work, my gardens, and the internet. There was a wonderful street fair on Third Avenue. As a country boy, I sure do love visiting New York. I'd like to do a week of urban hiking there, with camera and beer stops and a nice hotel suite. Invite all of our readers to hike along too.
Some fresh photos below the fold.
Continue reading "NYC"
Monday, May 21. 2012
One of my kids attended a very demanding high school, a boarding school, actually. During senior or possibly junior year, this youth showed me his AP European History thesis. The master had written on top, in the usual red ink, "Best AP European History thesis I have read in ten years. Almost publishable. B+"
I believe he understood the compliment. The master believed that, however fine and well-researched the work was, he could have taken it even further.
From The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn - The greatest tragedy of progressive education is not the students' lack of skills, but of teachable character.
“An A,” she said jubilantly, but with a strong undertone of derision. “And I didn’t even read the book!” As the paper thudded into the trash basket, her friends joined in the disdainful laughter.
That quote is about college, not the local high school. Another quote from the essay:
The person who is never challenged is also never refined, never learns to cope with the setbacks that come on the way to high endeavor. And it is not only in the academic realm, of course, that they may be hampered: a full life outside of university also requires the ability to confront one’s weaknesses and recover from defeat. Despite the admittedly important emphasis on character formation in our schools — on tolerance, anti-racism, refusal of bullying, and so on — it seems that we have failed to show students what real achievement looks like and what it will require of them.
Colleges have become high schools. As far as I have heard, only the elite boarding schools still maintain the highest expectations and standards, far higher than even the most elite colleges.
We are inundated with pseudo-science. I have a few relevant links:
Via Fast Science:
... the pace of scientific discovery is slow. This does not mean that we need to hide every step of it from view until we get the results that we deem worthy of sharing. On the contrary, I agree with those who think that sharing at the more interim steps can only improve what we do. Yet the innumeracy, fame and fortune are forces that put such free sharing in peril by misrepresenting it as the final answer to everything. And when the answer is changed, which is not only expected, but indeed desired in scientific pursuits, the public opinion punishes science.
From Science vs. PR:
That’s the whole substance of the paper. Straight-ahead chemistry, exploring a possible explanation for an observed phenomenon and drawing out one tentative prediction. “Showing that it could have happened this way is not the same as showing that it did,” the author most properly concedes. He should have quit while he was ahead. What imp of the perverse induced him to add two more sentences?
Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth. We would be better off not meeting them.
Maybe the PR guy talked him into it.
From The New Phrenology - How liberal psychopundits understand the conservative brain:
That the “rich and powerful” are identical to conservatives and Republicans—Edsall’s assumption—is a hoary idea dear to many Democrats and essential to their self-image as the opponents of privilege. It persists even though many of the plushest and most powerful institutions of American life are in the hands of liberal Democrats: public and private universities, government bureaucra-cies, nonprofit foundations, movie studios, television networks, museums, newspapers and magazines, Silicon Valley . . . Among the fabled “1 percent,” according to Gallup, the number of self-identified Republicans is only slightly greater than the number of Democrats. As Christopher Caldwell has pointed out in these pages, political donations from 19 of the 20 richest ZIP codes in the United States go overwhelmingly to Democrats, by a ratio of four to one or more. Democrats are the party of what Democrats used to call the superrich. Only Democrats seem not to realize this.
From Pathologizing Normalcy and Overdiagnosing Pathology:
In the U.S, the DSM boils down to three critical issues: reimbursement, reimbursement and reimbursement. It should be renamed the American Diagnostic and Reimbursement Manual, so that those who use it outside the U.S. better understand the influences behind it.
Paul Mirengoff’s lawyerly skills rebut Karl Rove’s campaign skills on whether Rev. Wright should be raised as an issue in the 2012 presidential campaign. The difference is between inside-Beltway and what turns on (or off) the jurors, voters.
Karl Rove considers President Obama’s twenty-year attachment to his radical minister as old hat, largely because failed presidential contender John McCain declined to raise it in 2008, and because the Obama administration’s record is so bad in itself that it should be enough to defeat him in 2012.
Paul Mirengoff, however, says that “presidential elections aren’t just about issues; they are about the person in whom we are entrusting our highest office.” Mirengoff then goes into how campaigns actually occur:
The second argument for shying away from Wright is that raising the issue will backfire, as pro-Obama forces accuse Romney of personal attacks and racism. But Romney need not, and should not, make the attacks; nor should the major PACs that back him. If the issue is raised –- after testing it with focus groups — it should be raised by lesser groups, as was the case with ads attacking John Kerry over his military service….It’s not racist to be disturbed by the fact that Obama chose a rabidly anti-American, who happens to be Black, as his spirtual [sic] leader. And, of course, Obama’s associations with white radicals can be invoked as part of the same line of attack.
In 2004, defenders of Kerry insinuated that Karl Rove was involved in the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth campaign to show that Kerry’s narrative of Vietnam heroism was false. Their only “proof” was that some of the same people supported President Bush and the Swiftees or that anti-Kerry Swiftees lacked enough documented evidence in Navy records.
That would be a problem for a Wright-Obama campaign in 2012, except that Kerry’s critics were the witnesses to his overblown attempted image whereas Obama’s own words and actions are the witness to his radical past. Further, Obama’s radical past is directly in line with his radical presidential policies and actions.
Were it only Rev. Wright that might be downplayed as but one indiscretion, albeit a twenty-year one. But, throughout Obama’s life his self-proclaimed formative mentors were cut of the same radical cloth, and in his administration he has appointed others of this ilk.
During the 2004 campaign I was interviewed by a star New York Times reporter, pro-Kerry, about the Swiftee campaign. I was fairly quoted, and continued an email correspondence with the reporter. After Bush narrowly won, this was our last email exchange:
Note to Todd Purdum, New York Times: If not for the anti-Kerry Vietnam veterans, shifting many thousands of votes, the election may well have been lost by Bush.
Reply from Purdum: Hard to argue with your analysis.
Mirengoff wins the dispute.
Nonetheless, I and others opposed to President Obama’s re-election must be responsibly concerned that some others opposed to his re-election may exceed the facts of his radical nature, and – of course – will be the ones given most prominence by the pro-Obama legacy media. That is unavoidable. But, regardless, the core truth will resonate with many who otherwise would be unaware of the facts of Obama's proudly radical past and how it shows in his present. It will be another strike against Obama that, again, may determine the margin in 2012.
From the article:
- The graduates of our social sciences and humanities programs are increasingly found wanting in the workplace. Unless they can find employment in a leftist dominated milieu (e.g., government, academia, public sector union, media conglomerate), the American business world finds them ill-equipped to function successfully in what remains of the US entrepreneurial society.
- The costs of a university indoctrination--er, that is, education--have skyrocketed. In light of the previous bullet, consumers-- i.e., the students' parents--find it increasingly hard to justify the expense.
- Intense criticism of the faculty is on the rise: they can't teach; or what they teach is garbage or propaganda; they're too busy with their "research"; and they are overpaid.
- Administrative policies make no sense--multiculturalism trumps achievement, political correctness outweighs impartiality.
- Most damaging, our universities, after a prolonged period of indoctrination, return students to their parents in a form that parents cannot recognize--their opinions, values and behavior have been altered beyond repair. (To be fair, it is encouraging that a not insignificant percentage of college grads manage to resist the brainwashing on campus).
Sunday, May 20. 2012
From a pal:
Pops and I went up to Oswego, NY this week to fish Lake Ontario for King Salmon and Brown Trout. Had an excellent trip. Fished with T-K Charters and stayed at K&G Lodge http://www.kandglodge.com/. I highly recommend both.
As the pictures will attest, we caught our limit of Kings (3/person), ranging in size from 9-13 pounds, couple of Brown Trout, a couple of Lake Trout and a Steelhead. Left the dock in Oswego a bit before 5am, ran 2 miles right off the Town and had our limit by 9am (would have been earlier buy Pops lost a couple. I, of course, landed every fish on my line . .), and back to the dock by 1030a.
Probably one of the easier fishing trips - Dunkin Donuts is open 24 hours, so we had hot coffee and donuts on the boat. Guy at the dock filleted the fish for $4/fish and included ice for the cooler and we were back home by 5pm.
That fishery is pretty consistent from year to year, not only with state stockings but a decent (not great) level of naturally reproducing fish. Fish are close to shore as the water warms earlier in the shallows (that is relative as we were fishing in 90 feet of water, temps in the low 50's). Trolled spoons and anyone who says a 12 pound salmon on 10 pound test is not a fight, knows not of what he speaks. Oh - and about 35 pounds of salmon fillets for the freezer.
Guy on the right in the pics is the mate. He works doing maintenance at nuke plants for 8 months of the year, and fishes the other 4. His father was the Captain and both know what they are great fisherman
BTW - Pops is 78 (79 this October) and cannot wait to go next year.
I think he likes me. I copied it below the fold.
Now back to my honey-do list. Sheesh.
Continue reading "Got a friendly email from President Obama today"
Spend a couple of hours in a French bistro with excellent bistro food in Soho. Raoul's.
You need a reservation.
A shout-out to our friends at the Shelburne Museum, just a short drive south of Burlington.
An interesting and highly eclectic collection. I get a kick out of these small town museums which were started by eccentric rich folks who collected odd stuff. A good outing for a rainy day, or a day with nothing fun planned.
The Cloisters in NYC is similar. Also, good fun.
 Food Rules! Tyler Cowen’s useful new book helps ordinary diners find the good stuff.
DISCOVERING THE PRESIDENTIAL ORIGIN OF ‘OK’
Olympics, 388 B.C.: Mud, Sex, Hymns…Sports Too - Political rivalries flared and money flowed—but it was more like a rock festival than what we'll see in London
Arriving in Manzanillo
CNN Urges Normal Couples to Emulate Homosexuals’ Promiscuity
How Ignorance Fuels Science and the Evolution of Knowledge
Borat - and the Dictator - and Zionism
The truth is that Facebook is a toy, a dreamworld, a figment of the imagination.
Muslim Voters Change Europe
Belmont: The Son of Paleface
Cities Double Down on CRA Insanity That Caused 2008 Crisis
Roger: Who Is Barack Obama? The Question that Won’t Go Away:
...the noteworthy thing is that it is one more puff in the cloud of unknowing that surrounds the president.
It’s been pretty foggy in those precincts for some time.
Obama as con-man, fraud? Steyn
OK, but it is the policies that do not make any sense to me. Aren't most pols narcissistic frauds?
Why Hugo Chávez hates Jews: New book explores roots of anti-Semitism in Venezuela
Convicted Terrorist Brett Kimberlin and the Left's Political (and Criminal) Intimidation Network
Joe Lieberman: Turn the tide against Bashar al-Assad
I have yet to meet a single critic of our policy in Syria who believes that the situation in Syria is simple.
EU violates Aarhus Convention in ‘20% renewable energy by 2020’ program
Our Very Own Greece
Do not think about Jeremiah Wright
Buddy recommends: Jewish World Review
Malik Ali Brings the Crazy to Irvine Speech
Their Sense of Belonging - A historian vividly reconstructs Eastern Europe as a place of Jewish life rather than of Jewish death.
Deadly Disengagement - When Czech democracy needed defending, America was inattentive. The U.S. point man in Prague spent much of his time in New York.
Obama's 'Less Economy': Americans Facing Less Work, Less Reward
Psalm 1
1:1 Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers;
1:2 but their delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law they meditate day and night.
1:3 They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper.
1:4 The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
1:5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
1:6 for the LORD watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
As the beavers becomes more common, the wonderful habitats they create - marshes and ponds, Alder and willow thickets, -proliferate. Wood Ducks, Black Ducks, herons, amphibians, snakes, turtles, songbirds, swallows, bugs. Everybody likes a beaver marsh. You can barely see one of their series of dams in the foreground.
 �
Saturday, May 19. 2012
A book (not just for people with alcohol problems): The Search for Serenity and How to Achieve It
 Ever gnaw on a raw Rhubarb stem? I used to love that, when I was a kid. Especially the tender thin stems. Huge flavor, tangy, bitter, spicey.
While "researching" this post, I learned that it's commonly done in Turkey and Iraq. Our garden rhubarb came from China. The leaves are poisonous. There are lots of types of rhubarbs, most inedible.
Rhubarb is the most reliable edible perennial that you can have in your northern garden. Just throw some manure on them every Spring, and you're done. The only problem I have had with them (my last patch) was that the plants kept going to flower and seed without producing new stems. I guess I should have cut off the flowering stems sooner.
How to make a rhubarb patch.
A few fine Rhubarb recipes (don't talk to me about Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie which is an insult to both Strawberry and Rhubarb).
Rhubarb Crisp
Rhubarb Tart
Rhubarb Custard Pie
Vermont bans fracking, but there is no oil or gas in Vermont, nor do they understand what fracking is
Funny, they don't ban fracked fuels from other states
My Son Looks Like a Girl. So What? (h/t Althouse)
Fat, Broke, and Single?
Regulating the Innovation Out of Charter Schools
Media Works To Suppress Obama 'Born in Kenya' Bio
"we rich Westerners are already beyond the practical limits that humans should ever aspire to achieve in terms of health, wealth – and even of education."
Why the Obama Campaign Is Blowing the Election
Ain’t no politics like identity politics ’cause identity politics don’t stop
Diversity training makes things worse (h/t Insty)
Media Pretends Mormonism Will Hurt Romney; Study Says Opposite
Clive Crook: Why I Think Obama Is Losing:
Obama's big problem, I think, is that he is no longer the president he said he would be. Above all, he's stopped trying to be that president.
U.S. Metros Are Ground Zero for Majority-Minority Populations
According to Adecco, nearly a third of parents are helping their kids find work, and nearly one in ten are taking them to job interviews.
Re-linked: Acknowledging The Arrival Of Peak Government
Via NYM:
Treating college as the new high school hasn’t benefited students who waste four years of their lives and pick up staggering debts which make it harder for them to buy homes and start families, but it has benefited the liberal arts infrastructure, which, despite the liberal spin, is just as good at handing out useless degrees with no career path as any for-profit college. And it has benefited the Democratic Party, which rightly sees college campuses as recruitment grounds and liberal-voter-training seminars. ...
Re-linked: Deterring Bullies: The “Karate Kid” Program
Is Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a 1978 case rejecting academic racial quotas, the smoking gun behind Obama’s Kenyan identity?
The Audacity of Faith
Deficit likely higher than Jerry Brown's estimate
Did Elizabeth Warren Plagiarize Her 'Pow Wow Chow' Recipes?
Linda Chavez on her DNA geneology
Howie Carr: If moccasin were on the other foot...
‘Barack Obama: A Composite Kenyan’
Sweeney Among the Nightingales (1918)
 Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.
The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward toward the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the horned gate.
Gloomy Orion and the Dog
Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;
The person in the Spanish cape
Tries to sit on Sweeney's knees
Slips and pulls the table cloth
Overturns a coffee-cup,
Reorganized upon the floor
She yawns and draws a stocking up;
The silent man in mocha brown
Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;
The waiter brings in oranges
Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;
The silent vertebrate in brown
Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
Rachel née Rabinovitch
Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;
She and the lady in the cape
Are suspect, thought to be in league;
Therefore the man with heavy eyes
Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,
Leaves the room and reappears
Outside the window, leaning in,
Branches of wisteria
Circumscribe a golden grin;
The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,
And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid droppings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.
Friday, May 18. 2012
Factory fishing, aided by helos, has crushed the population of Bunker. An excellent and thorough review of the politics of the plankton-eating Menhaden which, like the Herring, is the preeminent fish of the lower end of the Atlantic food chain:
A Fish Story - How an angler and two government bureaucrats may have saved the Atlantic Ocean.
Related: Save the Most Important Fish in the Sea
Roger Kimball is one of too few conservative writers who can lend deep erudition to connect the central tenets of Western civilization with today’s immediate events and concerns. Kimball’s influence is not only through his own writings but his featuring of that of others at his The New Criterion and its blog Arma Virumque (I’ve been overhonored to appear at the blog) and his publishing house Encounter Books.
Now, you have the chance to get in depth with Kimball’s learning and lessons in his new book The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia. Order at this link.
Kimball entices you with a few short excerpts:
Why does relativism, which begins with a beckoning promise of liberation from “oppressive” moral constraints, so often end in the embrace of immoral constraints that are politically obnoxious? Part of the answer lies in the hypertrophy or perversion of relativism’s conceptual enablers— terms like “pluralism,” “diversity,” “tolerance,” “openness,” and the like. They all name classic liberal virtues, but it turns out that their beneficence depends on their place in a constellation of fixed values. Absent that hierarchy, they rapidly degenerate into epithets in the armory of political suasion. They retain the aura, the emotional charge, of positive values. But in reality they act as moral solvents, as what Gairdner calls “value-dispersing terms that serve as an official warning to accept all behaviours of others without judgment and, most important, to keep all moral opinions private.” In this sense, the rise of relativism encourages an ideology of non-judgmentalism only as a prelude to ever more strident discriminations.
And…
[T]he fruits of egalitarianism are ignorance, the habit of intellectual conformity, and the systematic subjection of cultural achievement to political criteria. In the university, this means classes devoted to pop novels, rock videos, and third-rate works chosen simply because their authors are members of the requisite sex, ethnic group, or social minority. It involves an attack on permanent things for the sake of the trendy and ephemeral. It means students who are graduated not having read Milton or Dante or Shakespeare—or, what is in some ways even worse, who have been taught to regard the works of such authors chiefly as hunting grounds for examples of patriarchy, homophobia, imperialism, or some other politically correct vice. It means faculty and students who regard education as an exercise in disillusionment and who look to the past only to corroborate their sense of superiority and self-satisfaction.
And…
Want more? Read the book.
|
If you have a minute, catch up on the stuff we posted over the weekend. We do it for you!