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.
Always surprising to me how many amateur cooks have no clue about how to handle knives in the kitchen. Plenty of knife skill vids here. One basic example:
Tutors or parents, plus a Kindle, may be all that is necessary:
... the simplest tutoring approach often works magic. Years ago, a twelve-year-old foster child arrived in our home essentially unable to read after six or seven years of classroom "special" education. To the point where he didn't even know how to use a dictionary. Our oldest son, a prolific writer, happened to be visiting us at the time, saw the problem, and came up with a fix. He handed the boy the newspaper he read each morning, told him to sit on his bed, read it aloud, and circle every word he couldn't pronounce or didn't know the meaning of. Then, later, the two of them went over the circled words together. The first day, every fourth or fifth word was circled, but it wasn't very long before the number of circles began to decrease, and something clicked in the boy's mind. "Hey," he seemed to say to himself, "this is not such a mystery. I can get this reading and writing thing working on my own." And he went on to other material. Then, when he was ready to begin high school, the state and local school district sent a team to evaluate him in order to design a classroom program that met his "special needs." Only there wasn't any, because they were shocked to discover that he tested at or above -- and in a couple of subjects, far above -- his grade level.
"I start dreading Christmas from the time the decorations go up in the stores," she says. "It stopped being fun for me, so I'll find out this year if I can do without it altogether. I think it will be a relief. It already is."
Remember, back in the day, when a bankruptcy was simply called a bankruptcy? Naturally, this was well before ISDA came on the scene and footnoted the living feces out of everything by claiming that a bankruptcy is never a bankruptcy, as long as the creditors agree to 99.999% losses at gunpoint, with electrodes strapped to their testicles, submerged in a tank full of rabid piranhas, it they just sign a piece of paper (preferably in their own blood) saying the vaseline-free gang abuse was consensual. Well, now we learn that as the global insolvency wave finally moves to China, a bankruptcy is now called something even less scary: "deferred loan payments"...
Welcome to Cairostan - Egypt’s radicals eliminating country’s connection to West, but does anyone care?
Bruce wonders whether you've ever seen a Jewish Zebra:
The Wall St. daughter's pup was visiting this weekend. Nice sweater, eh? This Yorkie pup, named Emily (from Devil Wears Prada) has quite an elegant wardrobe. They have hair, not fur, so they get cold. Yorkies were bred to be ratters. They do like to chase and destroy little dog toys with their tiny sharp teeth. They have ADHD, I think.
I know, I know: it is shameless to use dog pics to build traffic.
We are putting our other, youngest, college daughter on a plane to Saigon Ho Chi Minh City this afternoon, via Shanghai, with a pocketful of cash, a backpack, a carry-on, and her best camera. She's done a fair amount of world-traveling on her own and with us, so it's no big deal for her. Like me, she travels casually. She threw some stuff into her bags in 15 minutes this morning like I do. She's doing a film. She promises to email pics, but she probably won't bother because she is always driven to focus on her immediate goal, and ignores everything peripheral to it. Goal-directed almost to a fault, which seems to be what life requires these days. A terrier. She'll be meeting an American friend in Hanoi via the train at some point. I gave her a kiss and had to say "Kill a Commie for Christ." Somehow, PC eludes me and I always say the totally wrong thing, even on Christmas Day. Harvard would fire me.
My Vietnam Vet pal Gwynnie asked "She's going there voluntarily?" My parents felt that way about Germany.
Flight from NYC to Shanghai almost touches the North Pole, so we suggested a hearty shout-out "Thanks" to Santa. He deserves it. He brought me a new leather office chair. Those Great Circle air routes are always surprising, aren't they, until you get used to them?
I had thought she was planning to go straight from Nam to Prague in three weeks but she decided to schedule to come back home for a few days first because it's tropical in Nam, winter in Prague. Change of chic wardrobe. Wanted to catch a play or two in NYC, and to grab some fresh cash (but she knocks herself out almost beyond belief to fund her adventures). Sheesh. The kids these days are so ambitious, determined, goal-directed, adventurous, and hard-working - much more than my peer group ever was. Like many of the hip youths these days, she loves Ron Paul. Sheesh, again. "Dad, Libertarianism is the only right, principled thing for the American attitude." "OK, sweetie. Whatever."
All three of my kids crack me up, each in his/her own way. Where the heck did they come from? From God. I take no credit or blame.
Want to read a good, short Christmas vignette today? Sipp's Open Is A Time.
How did the ancient mass media report the alleged birth of Christ? The People's Cube prepared the following compilation of quotes from the Roman and Judean sources, which should help our readers to form an unbiased opinion of what really happened in the days surrounding the so-called Christmas...
The meaning of Christmas is much bigger than the trite clichés that usually come up in this context; I won’t just be writing about the Importance of Giving and the Desirability of Being Nice. Christmas, at least the way I was taught, is a lot more than a merry interlude in the darkest, nastiest time of the year. It is more than getting or even giving. It is more than carols and candy, more than wonderful meals with the people you love best in the world. It is much more than the modern echo of the pagan festivities marking the winter solstice and the moment when the sun begins to reverse its long and slippery slide down the sky.
For Christians, 78% of the American people according to a recent Gallup poll, Christmas is the hinge of the world’s fate, the turning point of life. It is the most important thing that ever happened, and we celebrate it every year because it is still happening now. Whether we know it or not, whether we appreciate it or not, we are part of the Christmas Event that has turned history upside down. There’s a reason why we date the birth of Christ as the year 1 and why traditionally the world’s history was divided into BC, before Christ, and AD, anno domini, the year of the Lord.. (Actually, the monk who tried to calculate it seems to have gotten it wrong; Jesus was probably born four to six years “BC”. He also did not know about the use of zero as a number; there is no Year Zero between AD and BC — which is why irritating pedants remind people at every turn of the century that the “real” new century or millennium doesn’t begin until 2001, for example, rather than on January 1, 2000.)
Thanks for doing this for us, Prof. Mead. It's a good gift.
They claim they confiscated over a hundred thousand dangerous items. One of them was my over-large tube of Crest toothpaste, and one of them was my jar of Amish mustard.
Just a bunch of bitter, redneck clingers, not Real Americans. Want to see real clueless parochialism? Try DC or NYC, San Francisco, or the entire state of Massachusetts
Nobody works 9-5 anymore in America, unless government jobs or union jobs. Furthermore, seems to me that most Americans work far more than 8 hour days. Americans are not afraid of work. Heck, my daughter is working all day today.
I On the Morning of Christ's Nativity This is the month, and this the happy morn Wherein the Son of Heav'n's eternal King, Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born, Our great redemption from above did bring; For so the holy sages once did sing, That he our deadly forfeit should release, And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.
II That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable, And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty, Wherewith he wont at Heav'n's high council-table, To sit the midst of Trinal Unity, He laid aside, and here with us to be, Forsook the courts of everlasting day, And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.
III Say Heav'nly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein Afford a present to the Infant God? Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain, To welcome him to this his new abode, Now while the heav'n, by the Sun's team untrod, Hath took no print of the approaching light, And all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright?
IV See how from far upon the eastern road The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet: O run, prevent them with thy humble ode, And lay it lowly at his blessed feet; Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet, And join thy voice unto the angel quire, From out his secret altar touched with hallowed fire.
Terrific piece at ZeroHedge today using Christmas Trees and land management as an allegory for the Fed's interventions in the market, and why it's dangerous.
We can increase moral hazard by taking effective steps to 'insure' against its downside. At some point, however, everything has to revert to the mean.
A quote:
From a forestry point of view, the lessons were learned. In 1995, the Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy stated, "Science has changed the way we think about wildland fire and the way we manage it. Wildland fire, as a critical natural process, must be reintroduced into the ecosystem."
Herein are pearls of great wisdom for central bankers today. Central banks are creating a tinderbox by keeping alive many very bad investments, fertilizing them with everything from artificially low interest rates to preferential liquidity to outright securities purchases. As these institutions and instruments overrun the financial landscape, they hamper the economic ecosystem and perpetuate the environment of low growth and high unemployment in which we currently find ourselves.
When Gutenberg printed his first Bible in 1455, is it possible he ever thought "I believe this technology will be outdated in 650 years"? Doubtful. In fact, he probably didn't even care.
We do care about change, though. Mainly because it is part of our lives. Change shapes us and molds us, even as we create the change we seek in our own lives. For Gutenberg, much of life was relatively the same over the course of time. By the time Benjamin Franklin was a printer 300 years later, he was still using essentially the same technology Gutenberg had created. Some revisions had taken place, but it was still a very manual process and the nature of the process would not seem unfamiliar to Gutenberg.
It's been about 100 years since men like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst changed the business of publishing. How would they have reacted to a blog like Maggie's? Could they have envisioned the future and recognized opportunity? It's possible, but more likely they would have feared the shift in message delivery systems and fought the new technology. Our perceptions about what we do and where we are going is shaped by what we've have done in the past. As a result, we tend to react poorly to new ideas and products which don't fit neatly into the way we believe life should progress. 25 years ago, we would have considered it odd to think that a TV would hang on a wall or that we could purchase virtually everything we needed as we watched a TV program.
This is the sort of thing I might expect from a lesser, more insecure institution but it is, after all, where Larry Summers got whacked for daring to opine that women might be slightly different from men.
It's creepy as hell, stupid on so many levels, and a good example of pantywaist Dhimmitude too. In fact, you could characterize the Harvard faculty's response as hate speech against the truly peaceful Hindus. Robespierre was like this. Eventually, they decided to remove his head from the rest of his body, too. There's the rub.
It's getting so there are so many things you aren't supposed to say these days...can't even say to a chick in the office that "Hey, you look great today." So no "hate speech" - and no "love speech" either. Or is "love speech" covert "hate speech" because it is demeaning? It's difficult to know, anymore, because it seems OK for them to say to me "You look hot today." I don't really mind being "objectified" as a sex object by women, however. I deserve it, and I enjoy it because I must be an evil part of the partriarchy (or a skirt-chaser, which I am, along with every other red-blooded single guy), or whatever.
Over the years, I think I have posted many things here that would get me fired from Harvard. Things about appreciating pretty girls, things about gals being different from guys, things about Jihadists being a danger to civil civilization, things about Lefties being closet fascists, silly mockery of radical Feminists and of the "Transgender Community" - they have a community? - and plenty of other no doubt dangerous, verboten topics. Somebody should just wire my jaw and cut off my fingers. It's all insane. (Is saying they're all insane impermissible "hate speech"?)
What is this, North Korea? Well, they used to hang Quakers in Boston and burn witches in the suburbs. Veritas, indeed. They should change their motto to "Political Veritas du Jour" instead.
Fortunately for me, I now work for an increasingly-profitable evil Capitalist busiiness where my job is to add value and productivity, instead of for wealthy Harvard which hoards its charity-given, tax-deductible billions and refuses to share it with the struggling 99%. Catch you all around the corner. I'm headed north for family and skiing with friends this week. I'd better play it safe here before I get in trouble, so Happy Kwanzaa and Merry Solstice to our wonderful readers.
We're entering a slow time on the intertunnel between pre-Christmas and the New Year. Normal people don't want to have to think too much right now, and don't want to get bummed out with the daily depressing news.We will press on, however, but readers might anticipate a fair number of recycled posts next week. Many of our staff will be merrily skiing and wassailing in the frozen north, but we have "content" in the pipeline.
A book coming out soon: Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room, by David Weinberger
I am not a knowledge-nihilist, but readers know that I take everything I hear with a grain of salt. Stupid not to.
The big thing in recent years for theoretical physicists is the replacement of the notion of the "universe" with the notion of the "multiverse." A quote from The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith:
The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the fully explained: the hue of the sky, the orbits of planets, the angle of the wake of a boat moving through a lake, the six-sided patterns of snowflakes, the weight of a flying bustard, the temperature of boiling water, the size of raindrops, the circular shape of the sun. All these phenomena and many more, once thought to have been fixed at the beginning of time or to be the result of random events thereafter, have been explained as necessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature—laws discovered by human beings.
This long and appealing trend may be coming to an end. Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.
Read the whole thing. Science fiction, epistemology, God - it's all on the table. All uplifting, bedazzling, profoundly confusing, and probably more the stuff of poetry than of prose. I have no doubt that Really Big Reality is beyond human perception, comprehension or imagination. I am prone to term that swirl of transendent incomprehensibility "God." Not a tame lion, as CS Lewis said. Sometimes reality seems mystical, and labelled "mysticism" just a pale copy.
And, despite it all, we all get up in the morning, say our prayers, get dressed, grab a Dunkin, go to the gym, take a shower, and get to work. Even the theoretical physicists and the priests and minsters do it.
"The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing."
Book Review: 
For many, 
The subversion of Christmas has 
On The Morning of Christ's Nativity
Terrific piece at ZeroHedge today using Christmas Trees and 
This is the sort of thing
Dance Teacher: 
I am not a knowledge-nihilist, but readers know that I take everything I hear with a grain of salt. Stupid not to. 
"The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing."