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.
Shooting a gun is like smoking a cigarette or drinking espresso in a café in Paris or having sex on a Caribbean beach: You’ve watched it so many times on-screen that you experience your own actions as an echo. It’s impossible not to feel like a cliché.
State officials have become addicted to federal subsidies because they allow them to spend money taken from taxpayers across the country instead of having to ask their voters to pony up the funds,
“An opposition that would earn its way back to leadership must offer not just criticism of failures that anyone can see, but a positive and credible plan to make life better, particularly for those aspiring to make a better life for themselves. Republicans accept this duty, gratefully.
“The routes back to an America of promise, and to a solvent America that can pay its bills and protect its vulnerable, start in the same place. The only way up for those suffering tonight, and the only way out of the dead end of debt into which we have driven, is a private economy that begins to grow and create jobs, real jobs, at a much faster rate than today.
“Contrary to the President's constant disparagement of people in business, it's one of the noblest of human pursuits. The late Steve Jobs - what a fitting name he had - created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew. Out here in Indiana, when a businessperson asks me what he can do for our state, I say ‘First, make money. Be successful. If you make a profit, you'll have something left to hire someone else, and some to donate to the good causes we love.’
The killings at Haditha in November 2005 were blown up by opponents of the US in Iraq into an indictment of the US and its troops. This onslaught sapped the will of many Americans. The following rules of engagement and the drawn out prosecution of the Marines involved have undermined the morale and endangered the lives of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Take the premise that at Haditha both the Marines and those who were killed in houses 1 and 2 were correct in their own view. The long term losers are both US troops and noncombatants.
Both Marines and US troops generally are at increased risk due to perhaps understandable rules of engagement that in practice are often excessive and dangerous. Noncombatants are at increased risk of oppression, or more impersonal death from US technology, in countries where thuggish foes seek domination and can serve as refuges for further attacks on the West.
Haditha was a decidedly treacherous town overrun with Al Quaeda led foes who blew up Marines in the convoy and fired on the survivors from the nearby houses. What else could the Marines do but attack and eliminate the threat from the houses? Walking in, exposing themself to harm, would have been suicidal. Those inside lived in fear of the insurgents, who had already executed the local police force, and were aware that an IED was to be exploded. What else could they do but huddle inside? Warning the Marines beforehand would have exposed themselves to extermination. Walking outside, hands up, after the attack on the Marines, may have been a good move, but they knew gunmen were nearby and they didn’t want to be in the middle of a shootout.
Tried a good Italian restaurant the other day, and I decided to see what they could do with a simple Braciola - Braciole - (made with flank steak in this case) with a Barolo sauce.
Readers know that I am an obnoxious Italian food snob, but it's not my fault. I never ate Italian growing up, so I never heard of spaghetti and meatballs. Between Mrs. BD's cooking, and many trips to Italia, the two things often thought of as Italian in the US that I can do without are tomato sauce (this good place had no tomato sauces on the menu), and pasta (mostly, with rare exceptions for clam or porcini, or near-starvation with nothing else in the pantry). Another tip: never order a pizza in Italy. Terrible stuff. Only Americans know how to make good pizzas. Furthermore, you can get a better bruschetta in America than the lame, stingy ones you get in Italy.
Italian red wine sauces for meat are simple: briefly sautee a glass of good wine, a hunk of butter, salt, and a little flour to thicken. In Sicily, they add some raisins to it and a little sugar. That is pleasant.
They served the Braciola on a bed of soft, creamy polenta with a splash of oil on it. I think there was a touch of parmesan in the polenta. These are the simplest of foods. For me, that's Italian cooking. You cook that Braciola until it almost falls apart.
At our house, we make polenta as a primi, firm and knife-cuttable with a sauce on top - black truffle or Porcini - but this saucy polenta was a good choice by the chef. Soft polenta. My chef friend disparages firm polenta, but I think it's fine for the right purpose and it's real Italian - thanks to the American Indians who genetically-engineered corn (maize, to you in Yorba Linda Europe).
Like Italian potatoes, tomatoes, squash, polenta (corn meal) were all recent imported products from the New World, and their risotto from Asia. Pasta? It's a topic of debate.
Feel free to tell me how much you like spaghetti and meatballs, and soggy penne with red sauce!
I would highly recommend it for students before they take any neuoscience-related courses in school. Our learning theory here is that it's best to learn all you can about a topic before you take a course in it. That way, you will at least be oriented. Sometimes, the whole expensive course might end up being redundant.
I have been asked by readers why I can sound so harsh about education and our current educational systems. The answer is that I care about learning so much. For me, learning new things is relaxing, recreational, and a gift (and does not need to be expensive), but I accept that not all feel the same way. I am a teacher at heart, even though I do not teach although I do help train our young associates. If I were as tough on students as I am on our associates, I'd be fired in a New York Minute.
Schools of education represent the academic slums of most any college. American education can benefit from slum removal.
Sounds true, although those pathetic standards certainly do not apply to my town in CT where, unions aside, the public school teachers are well-educated, enthusiastic, demanding, and dedicated. However, our local school system avoids hiring teaching school graduates.
No questions on Iran in the CNN, ABC and NBC debates? No questions about the president's treatment of Netanyahu? No questions about the veto of Keystone XL pipeline?
No questions about Solyndra, Operation Fast and Furious," Joe Biden's serial inanities, the unconstitutional recess appointments? Gibson Guitar, Boeing, the Environmental Protection Agency's generation and cement rules?
Nothing about cutting 20,000 Marines and up to 100,000 soldiers?
Newt's ex-wife is tracked down, but we never got an interview with Bill Ayers or saw the Rashid Khalidi tape? Romney's tax returns are demanded again and again, but we never saw the president's college or law school transcripts?
Newt's display of anger -- even the over-the-top characterization of John King as despicable -- got cheering from everyone who had wanted the GOP candidates to run straight at the MSM and their deeply corrupt insularity and embedded biases.
I honestly do not know the answer, but it seems basic to me. If you can't master Algebra and Trig, and use them to hone the brain, it's tough for me to figure out how you graduate from high school.
Sorry, governor, but colleges don’t graduate students. Students graduate themselves if their efforts are sufficient, and the sad fact is that many who enroll are so academically weak and unmotivated that they don’t amass enough course credits to get their degrees within six years. That isn’t the fault of the institutions.
Maintaining standards is an endless and possibly a losing battle with today's credentialism. Someday, we'll have to admit that most people are not scholars (even to the level of Algebra ll), and that learning how to do something useful and practical might be more important. That view, however, runs right up against the Big Education lobbies.
There is no market for Sociology Majors, but there is a big market for Master Plumbers and Gunsmiths. They make more money, too. But they need to know some math to do their work.
And I just got done with all of the water well problems as well as having the chest freezer fail and losing over 300 pounds of organic pork and grass-fed beef. Throw in the divorce and 2011 has been a hell of a year.
Since the 1960s, the thrust of economic policy-making has been to smooth business cycles. Democracies crave prolonged prosperity, and economists have posed as technocrats with the tools to cure the boom-and-bust cycles of pre-World War II capitalism. It turns out that they exaggerated what they knew and could do.
Frank Wuterich agreed this morning to accept a prosecution offer of pleading guilty to one count of dereliction of duty, with relatively minor penalty. “Dereliction of duty” is such a broad count that it can cover most anything, and in possible multiple counts possible in the court martial, could have resulted in Wuterich facing much heavier penalties.
This ends his 7-year ordeal at the hand of zealot prosecutors and rush to judgment media. The prosecution in this case, as in all its others, saw its own witnesses either basically testify for the defense or be demonstrated as liars or otherwise unreliable.
Still, Frank Wuterich, as any defendant, faced the possibility of a worse outcome, what is commonly referred to as “litigation risk.” With not just himself but three young daughters to care about, weighed against the honor of the Marine Corps (although including some who may have acted less than completely honorably in this case), Wuterich’s decision is completely understandable.
As usual, Mark Walker’s report, intimate with all the Haditha cases, covers the salient points:
[The rationalists] have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality ... When one gives up Christian belief, one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. Whoever tries to peel off this fundamental idea—belief in God—from Christian morality will only be taking a hammer to the whole thing, shattering it to pieces.
Frederick Nietzsche (h/t Dr. Bob, who seems to be on blog sabbatical or retirement)
As far as I can determine, the Department of Education has no track record of positive accomplishment—nothing in the national numbers on educational achievement, nothing in the improvement of educational outcomes for the disadvantaged, nothing in the advancement of educational practice. It just spends a lot of money. This brings us to the practical question: If the Department of Education disappeared from next year’s budget, would anyone notice? The only reason that anyone would notice is the money. The nation’s public schools have developed a dependence on the federal infusion of funds. As a practical matter, actually doing away with the Department of Education would involve creating block grants so that school district budgets throughout the nation wouldn’t crater.
We have rreported so many scientific frauds in the past couple of weeks, I thought I would highlight some commonly-used "data-management" tricks designed to dishonestly influence people.
1. "Clustering." We have all heard about cancer clusters - Why does my town have triple the breast cancer of towns two miles away? There must be someone I can sue about this. Such claims have an emotional appeal, but they are nonsense. Random distribution is not even - it is uneven. Just try flipping a quarter, and you will get little runs of tails. Clustering is a natural effect of randomness, but trial lawyers are always busy trying to track them down: they can get rich before anyone figures out the game.
2. "Cherry-picking." Cherry-picking is a frankly dishonest form of data presentation, often used by newspapers to create alarmist stories about the economy, the environment, food safety, etc. It fools people without some decent science education. What it entails is combing through, say, 60 pieces of data, and then using the three points that support your argument, and ignoring the rest. Presenting random changes as meaningful facts is a lie. Environmentalists use this all of the time, as do other agenda-driven fact-handlers. A casual use of this fallacy is characteristic of The New York Times typical headline: Despite Good Economic Statistics, Some Are Left Behind - and then they scour NYC to find some single black mom in the Bronx who cannot support her kids - and she becomes the "story".
3. "Anectdotal evidence." The above example could also be termed "anectdotal evidence." If you look around, you can always find an exception, a story, and example - of ANYTHING. But anectdotes are compelling, and Reagan used them to the best effect. And how about those swimming Polar Bears! (I always thought they liked to swim.)
4. "Omitted evidence". You tell me how common this is! A first cousin of Cherry-picking, Omitted Evidence is also a lie. All you do is ignore the evidence and data that disagrees with your bias or your position. Simple.
5. "Confirmation bias". People tend to remember evidence which supports their opinion, belief, or bias, and to dismiss or forget evidence which does not. It's a human frailty. Humans have to struggle to be rational.
6. "Biased Data". "A poll at a local pre-school playground in Boston at 2 pm today indicated that 87% of likely voters will vote for Obama." Picking your data sources, like picking the questions you ask, can determine your results with great accuracy. As pollsters always say, "Tell me the answer you want, and I will design the question."
7. "Data mining." Data-mining is used by unscrupulous academics who need to publish. Because it is a retroactive search for non-hypothesized correlations, it does not meet criteria for the scientific method. Let's say you have 10,000 data points from a study which found no correlation for your hypothesis. Negative correlation studies are rarely published, but you spend a lot of time collecting it - so you ask your computer if it can find any other positive correlations in the data. Then you publish those, as if that was what you had studied in the first place.
Image: two good varieties of cherries for picking; Stella on the left, Lapins on the right, from Miller Nurseries
This production of Richard lll is a stunner, according to my family including my theatrical pupette, and the reviews. It's traveled around the world, now finishing up at BAM in New York until March 4. (Trailer of the performance at the link). Worth a trip to Brooklyn.
It's a joint production of the Old Vic, BAM, and Neal Street, known as "The Bridge."
“Mr. Spacey gives fierce and flashy physical life to every twist of a power-mad man’s corkscrew mind.” —The New York Times
Since we're on the topic of Shakespeare, Never Yet Melted found this:
Murray: The New American Divide - The ideal of an 'American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what's cleaving America, and why.
It is not that the average person is not concerned about the environment. Everyone weighs the balance of economic gain against a respect for nature. It is only the truly affluent, however, who can be concerned about the environment to the exclusion of everything else...
At one time, a college degree was a virtual guarantor of secure, well-paying employment. Now, most college grads leave school with large debts — more than $27,000 on average. A college degree also no longer signifies that the recipient is either well-educated in the traditional sense or that he has acquired specific skills suited to the labor market.
What race is Obama? Black or Caucasion or Middle-Eastern? What race am I? If the one-drop rule applies, I am Native American. And since when is "Hispanic" a race? Are people from Spain "Hispanic"? Are European Cubans Hispanic? Are Central American Indians Hispanic? Or Indians? Are black Cubans Hispanic? So confusing. And I haven't even gotten to the Irish: definitely a race - and a race with a history of cruel discrimination in the US for which generous compensation is due (my kids are 1/4 Irish and would welcome a check).
Do you ever play Mexican Train Dominoes? A good game, quite absorbing. We learned to play it in Mexico last year. More fun than watching TV. Uncle's Games sells Mexican Train Domino sets.
This game is said to be the most popular Domino game these days. Rules here (which sound more complicated than it is to play). It's a good alternative to Chess and Scrabble when you don't feel like over-taxing your brain, and 4 or 5 can play.
From 
The US has 55,000 miles of oil pipelines already. Who would object to a beer pipeline from Canada? 
In Praise of Worry
Life in the country: 
We have rreported so many scientific frauds in the past couple of weeks, I thought I would highlight some commonly-used "data-management" tricks designed to dishonestly influence people.
America is drunk