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.
Since pregnancy is a disease, then, someone else should pay the premium for insuring against the consequences of a woman’s risky, careless behavior. She shouldn’t even be responsible for grabbing some free condoms at the clinic and taking care of the risk herself.
Look even closer, and we see the real progressive agenda at work: increasing the power and reach of the federal government and its bureaucratic minions by discrediting and marginalizing any other source of authority over our behavior, especially institutions of moral authority such as churches. That way the government can aggrandize its power by relieving people of the responsibility for their choices through palliating their damaging consequences while making others pay for them. Tocqueville noticed 150 years ago this tendency of centralized power to expand by infantilizing the citizenry. Centralized governments, Tocqueville remarked, act as “if they thought themselves responsible for the actions and private conditions of their subjects, as if they had undertaken to guide and to instruct each of them in the various incidents of life and to secure their happiness quite independently of their own consent.”
Above: "almost completely leased before they're complete - if you can manage to get one expect to pay 2000 a month for a small one bedroom and 3400 for a three-bedroom" - Photo of Williston, ND, from this slide show: You've Never Seen Anything Like This North Dakota Oil Boomtown (h/t Carpe)
From Part 5 of Takuan Seiyo's The Bee and the Lamb, a rambling but interesting essay at Gates:
What emanates now from important Christian leaders, not to speak of such bona fide faithful as the Johnson, Carter, Kennedy, Bush, Blair, Brown and Atlee names adduced in a previous chapter, is something entirely different: it is secular solipsism and utopian eschatology masquerading as enlightened Christianity. It harks back to 2nd century Gnostics and not to the great Christian thinkers of the Renaissance or Enlightenment. It’s the lamb lying down with the lion that’s still a lion. It’s redistributive socialism and minorities-exalting Progressive doctrine that has nothing to do with the recognition of God’s presence on Earth.
and
The glow of Jesus has come to us distorted by the distance light has to traverse over 2000 years to reach the here and now, bounced along the way off such cracked mirrors, bent copper pans and dented silver chalices that the Gospel writers and Church leaders have been, and all men are. It’s miraculous that unknown outside a little sliver of a remote, benighted province at its inception, and multiplexed with great noise as it has been since, the transmission has reached us at all. Admitting that we don’t know where the noise ends and the transcendent music begins could rebuild a stout foundation for a new Christian spirituality. “There lives more faith in an honest doubt,“ wrote one of the great 10-percenters of the 19th century, Alfred Tennyson, “than in half the creeds.”
It depends on how you define "thinking." If "thinking" means an effort to form a logical progression of thoughts and ideas, words sure come in handy whether you intend to communicate the thoughts or not. In my experience, most people tend to avoid the effort that this requires unless they are trained to do it in some area of life such as diagnosing a car breakdown or a legal case or a medical complaint.
But if "thinking" refers to all sorts of mental activities, then of course words are not required for most of it. Impulses, gut feelings, images, daydreams, movement, musical ideas, etc. are all wordless mental activity (I exclude mathematics, which is just another language). Furthermore, unconscious mental activity, which may be the bulk of mental activity, is all or mostly wordless.
Speaking only for myself, I find that my words and my thought stream seem to do a sort of dance together, and a fresh new word or verbal concept can add new color or shape to it all. What is most fun is when a fresh word or phrase or concept crystallizes a dimly-thought thought.
Why the Titanic Still Fascinates Us - One hundred years after the ocean liner struck an iceberg and sank, the tragedy still looms large in the popular psyche
Having faith in the invisible hand of Purim - The image of an invisible hand can enable us to bridge the gap between those with merely a faith in God and those with merely a faith in man.
I have some family visiting midday on Saturday en route to pay homage to a newborn member of the clan, and figured we'd provide soup and sandwiches for the crew.
Somebody happened to mention turkey-mango sandwiches to me. It's a wonder how mangos have taken over in the supermarkets in Yankeeland, for good reason (I'll give y'all my mother in law's mango salad recipe some other time.)
Here are two versions, but I suppose one can mix and match. These could either be sandwiches or roll-ups (I have come to prefer roll-ups - less messy, less bread, and you don't need to eat as much if you cut them into 3" lengths).
Thin slices of fresh mango lettuce slice tomato swiss cheese or provolone avocado slices couple of turkey slices mayo
or
slices of Stilton slices of turkey arugula fresh mango, mango salsa or mango chutney lemon juice
or (if one is fresh out of mango)
turkey slices any cheese lettuce tomato very thin apple slices apple butter on one side (or prune butter. I love both of those old-timey things.) mayo on the other side
You can't get these at Subway. OK. I am hungry now.
This is what I term "a real job." These guys have balls. You may have seen this one before. I hate the way he has to make sure to tighten each hand-hold bolt on the final stretch. It's a nightmare for me.
Why moralism spoils the appetite - Adam Gopnik makes a powerful and entertaining case for why we shouldn’t ruin the aesthetic pleasure of food by adding a side order of moralism.
We have often posted here about food cranks and food Nazis, "organic food" nonsense and "natural food" nonsense, and even the concept of "healthy food". The "moral food" fad is just the latest incarnation of cranky food Calvinism - which is another incarnation of cranky Calvinism.
There is no doubt that guys enjoy variety, or at least the idea of it. They are liars if they claim they do not. Nature made them that way. Good character can make some of them acceptable, however, despite their nature.
"Every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later. . . . Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state."
Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (1943) (h/t Carpe Diem)
Yesterday, as Politico put it, "Leave it to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to one-up Rush Limbaugh in the name-calling department."
"Speaking of prostitutes, big oil's top call girl Sen Inhofe wants to kill fuel economy backed by automakers, small biz, enviros, & consumers," the New York-based environmentalist wrote Tuesday on Twitter.
Kennedy was targeting Inhofe for a letter the Oklahoma Republican sent last week to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson that questions the Obama administration's fuel economy and air pollution policies.
Eagerly awaiting President Obama's denunciation of a Kennedy. After all, according to Obama, it's supposed to be for Obama's daughters' sake, isn't it, to clean up political discourse?
An ex-Navy aviator, recently a contract pilot for the Navy. Loved those jets. I don't know what happened. I presume a crash. I had read his frightening Streamer post yesterday.
The most obviously predictable fiscal train-wreck in the world continues on, seemingly unabated by trillions of dollars of Keynesian-inspired “stimulus” spending whose proponents insist is the only way out of the current crisis, even as they insist that austerity programs are anathema to recovery. They are half-right, yet it is precisely that half-rightness that reveals the insidious nature of socialism: it is the expansion of the state, and the overwhelming number of people thoroughly accustomed to the dependency mindset, that has destroyed the kind of entrepreneurial spirit among those who desperately need private enterprise growth to rescue them. This spiritual debasement, courtesy of state-sponsored self-entitlement, is the dark underbelly of an ideology that can only survive until it runs out of other people’s money to spend. How do those “other people” acquire that money?
The comments here are quite amusing, in a typically crude Wall St. trader sort of way
Apparently electric vehicle maker — and recipient of lots of your and my money — Fisker Automotive is struggling. Who would have thought that a company that could not fully fund itself privately and had to rely on political connections to use the coercive power of government to take money from taxpayers might be a bad investment?
"Over at The New Republic, Timothy Noah explains why it's like totally different when Bill Maher calls Sarah Palin "a twat" and "a cunt," or when Keith Olbermann calls Michelle Malkin a "mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it."
Everything has already been said about Sandra Fluke, Rush Limbaugh, supporters and opponents of each, and double-standards toward misogynistic public statements, except to thank Ms. Fluke and her supporters for setting a new standard for future misogynistic utterances by all politicians and celebrities.
From here on out, we should expect a loud and persistent opprobrium by all and the media against anyone using such excessively derogatory terms to describe their opponent. Or, is such an expectation hollow and the double-standard be allowed to continue? Will the Left be hoisted by its own petard? If so, again thanks to Ms. Fluke and her supporters for making that hypocrisy evident. As yet many undecided voters are watching and taking note.
Halfway through my first year as a history teacher at an inner-city comprehensive in England, I am reeling from the volley of abuse and misbehaviour that makes up my daily grind. I can be sure that at some point in my day I will be aggressively confronted, blithely disobeyed, and probably sworn at. Restless nights are common, and nervousness ongoing. Still, talking to my friends from teacher training, I feel I'm having a comparatively easy ride. I have not yet been physically assaulted, and so far I have avoided the much-feared mid-lesson breakdown.
At schools such as this, the deprived background of the children is routinely presented as a catch-all explanation for bad behaviour. The pupils' chaotic home lives, their lack of prospects, and an absence of aspiration in the local community are all popular excuses for the pandemonium that pervades inner-city schools. These factors undoubtedly have an effect, but such thinking lets schools like this off the hook. The endemic discipline problem within the state sector is in reality self-inflicted. At least half a century of "progressive" thinking on pupil behaviour has had disastrous consequences. In the competitive field of follies wrought by 1960s radicalism, there is a very good case for progressive education being the most socially destructive.
In recent decades, key sectors of the American economy have experienced huge and disruptive transformations — shifts that have ultimately yielded beneficial changes to the way producers and customers do business together. From the deregulation that brought about the end of AT&T's "Ma Bell" system, to the way entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs forever changed the computer world once dominated by IBM, to the way the internet and bloggers have upended the business model of traditional newspapers, we have seen industries completely remade — often in wholly unexpected ways. In hindsight, such transformations seem to have been inevitable; at the time, however, most leaders in these fields never saw the changes coming.
The higher-education industry is on the verge of such a transformative re-alignment. Many Americans agree that a four-year degree is vastly overpriced — keeping many people out of the market — and are increasingly questioning the value of what many colleges teach. Nevertheless, for those who seek a certain level of economic security or advancement, a four-year degree is absolutely necessary. Clearly, this is a situation primed for change. In as little as a decade, most colleges and universities could look very different from their present forms — with the cost of a college credential plummeting even as the quality of instruction rises.
If this transformation does come to pass, it could have profound and beneficial implications.
When a struggling student getting D’s or F’s hears over and over that the only future for him is college, but college is an unrealistic expectation because the student isn’t academically oriented, resists school work, and has no educational career plans he can achieve without intense support and personal motivation (which he lacks), the student has only one alternative, and that is to drop-out. The F student who never studies or does a shred of homework often has no plans for the future. The lack of a life goal often leads to dropping out. The student who cannot or will not study sees a professional, college trained career as unattainable because all these professions require academic effort and knowledge, and this is a student who is academically behind appropriate level, sometimes by a significant gap. This leads to a “why try?” attitude. “Why try/” leads to quitting, floating along and letting life happen to you, teen pregnancy, dropping out, and gangs.
By insisting that everyone should attend college, college stops being a training place for the brightest minds. When everyone goes to college, it doesn’t elevate the unmotivated, non-studying student. It lowers the bar for everyone else.
Another consequence of the belief that everyone should go to college is that the high school student who graduates and gets a job is therefore seen under this paradigm as a failure. This is grossly unfair. This country has always valued the person who labors honestly, starts his own business, or provides people with desired goods and services. Historically these backbone working people have not needed a college degree. To this day many successful store or restaurant owners, plumbers, contractors, mechanics, and on and on, thrive despite never having graduated from, or perhaps never attending even a day of college. These people and their contributions should be valued. They obviously have all the education they need to create a business, provide needed services, and to succeed.
It's all about "The Dark Triad." From Yes, Chicks Dig Jerks, and evolutionary science gives us a good idea why:
The Dark Triad is a combination of psychological traits — subclinical psychopathology, subclinical narcissism, and what Professor Jonason calls “Machiavellianism” — that are, he believes, in fact a unitary phenomenon associated with a higher level of sexual success, defined in the literature as a larger number of total lifetime sexual partners. The correlation of the Dark Triad with larger numbers of sexual partners holds true for both men and women, but the effect is much more pronounced in men. This is unsurprising, inasmuch as men’s relative preference for larger numbers of short-term sexual relationships and women’s relative preference for long-term relationships is, as Professor Jonason notes, “one of the most consistent and strongest sex differences in the field.”
So: Machiavellianism, subclinical psychopathology, subclinical narcissism: not exactly the stuff of a Jane Austen romance, but apparently the stuff of sexual success. Professor Jonason concludes: “Together with low amounts of empathy and agreeableness” (I warned you this was depressing stuff) “such traits may facilitate — especially for men — the pursuit of an exploitative short-term mating strategy.”
But you knew that already, if you are a homo even half sapiens and went to high school.
That's all true of my experience with skirt-chasing seducers. They know how to say exactly what you need to hear but, in the end, you will never be enough for them because, Psychiatric as it may sound, they are really manchilds looking for Mommy while having fun with pseudo-adult seduction, romance and sex along the way.
Image is Luigi Bassi in the title role of Don Giovanni in 1787, via Wiki.
This is as fresh as the day he wrote it. The great (young) man himself conducted the premiere of this astonishing (comic?) opera in Prague, in 1787:
James Q. Wilson had been frequently referred to that way. He knew about everything.
My first reading of him was in his The Moral Sense, back when it had just come out. The book made a lot of sense to me (if you haven't read it, those Amazon comments on it are helpful).
Here's a Wilson quote from the end of the book:
Mankind’s moral sense is not a strong beacon light, radiating outward to illuminate in sharp outline all that it touches. It is, rather, a small candle flame, casting vague and multiple shadows, flickering and sputtering in the strong winds of power and passion, greed and ideology. But brought close to the heart and cupped in one’s hands, it dispels the darkness and warms the soul.
Well, the OWS Movement didn't last through a rather mild winter. They may have some vigor left as the election cycle heats up, but for the most part the press has ceased to be impressed with their value.
It seems the Fed isn't all that impressed, either. While I'm no fan of the Fed as a manager of the economy, they do some fine research.
Income inequality should not be vilified, and public policy should encourage people to move up the income distribution and not penalize them for having already done so.
What emanates now from important Christian leaders, not to speak of such bona fide faithful as the Johnson, Carter, Kennedy, Bush, Blair, Brown and Atlee names adduced in a previous chapter, is something entirely different: it is secular solipsism and utopian eschatology masquerading as enlightened Christianity. It harks back to 2nd century Gnostics and not to the great Christian thinkers of the Renaissance or Enlightenment. It’s the lamb lying down with the lion that’s still a lion. It’s redistributive socialism and minorities-exalting Progressive doctrine that has nothing to do with the recognition of God’s presence on Earth.
I have some family visiting midday on Saturday en route to pay homage to a newborn member of the clan, and figured we'd provide soup and sandwiches for the crew.
Church Ordered to 
It's all about "The Dark Triad." From 
James Q. Wilson had been frequently referred to that way. He knew about everything.