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.
40% of American college admits require some remedial education. I am not surprised. It's not to blame the secondary schools. It's just that we have people going to college who aren't college material - at least not yet.
The fact is that higher education is a booming industry in America, subsidized and supported by countless state and federal programs. Many of these schools are desperate for warm, paying bodies to fill their seats. Anybody can get into some college today, and they will do their darndest to keep him there because lower-tier schools need the income to survive (and need to report decent graduation rates).
We have become a nation of degree mills producing meaningless pieces of very expensive paper. I have interviewed many such people from lower tier schools and can report that they should not have bothered. They had the illusion that we might pay them more to do a clerical job if they had that degree from Eastern CT State College. Surprise, surprise - they can't do algebra, compose a literate and grammatical business letter, or get their minds around an abstract concept.
Who is the bigger sucker: Me, whose taxes subsidize the school? Or them, for wasting years when they could have been doing or learning something useful?
John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate set off a fiercely contemptuous reaction. The chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party said Mrs. Palin's sole qualification for high office was that she had never had an abortion. The comedian Bill Maher scoffed at the idea that "this stewardess" would be first in the line of succession. The scorn moved The Atlantic Monthly's Clive Crook to write that "the metropolitan liberal, in my experience, regards overt religious identity as vulgar, and evangelical Christianity as an infallible marker of mental retardation. Flag-waving patriotism is seen as a joke and an embarrassment."
The denunciation of Palin took place 45 years after William F. Buckley Jr. wrote: "I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University." From Richard Nixon's invoking the "silent majority" to Mrs. Palin's campaigning as a devout, plainspoken hockey mom, conservatives have claimed that they share the common sense of the common man. Liberals from Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama to innumerable writers, artists and academics have often been willing foils in this drama, unable to stop themselves from disparaging the very people whose votes are indispensable to the liberal cause. The elephant-in-the-room irony is that the liberal cause is supposed to be about improving the prospects and economic security of ordinary Americans, whose beliefs and intelligence liberals so often enjoy deriding.
Buckley's identification of the political fault line running beneath the campus quadrangle was confirmed by "UD," a blogger for "Inside Higher Ed." Belittling Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho, UD concluded, "A lot of Americans don't seem to like highly educated people, and they don't want them running the country." He continued:
We need to encourage everyone to be in college for as many years as they possibly can, in the hope that somewhere along the line they might get some exposure to the world outside their town, and to moral ideas not exclusively derived from their parents' religion. If they don't get this in college, they're not going to get it anywhere else.
Thus, higher education is remedial education, and the affliction it remedies is an American upbringing.
Read the whole thing (link above). Voegli captures one of those things that bugs the heck out of me. But I am "mentally retarded," so I guess my view doesn't count. We aren't opposed to "higher ed." However, we believe in common sense, and we believe that the intelligent will and do educate themselves, and that the foolish will remain foolish with their degrees. Especially nowadays, with our degraded standards and expectations (examples - it is possible to graduate from college in the US today without ever taking any calculus, physics, statistics, economics, or American History).
For the blank youth in a land without history, there is no past except as a scrambled mess of tropes, images and symbols to be combined and recombined in the way that amuses them best. There is only the wide open future. A future that is at once hopeful and hopeless. Ahead revolutions beckon. Each revolution excites them, and then fails, hardening them. They are told over and over again that the future belongs to them. But at some point they are forced to realize that in truth nothing belongs to them. Not the past. Not the present. And most certainly not the future.
"Maybe nothing is really bad, since I am convinced that we will win the future."
Abbie Hoffman
Historical inevitability. The conviction that WE WILL WIN THE FUTURE. It makes the difference between victory and defeat. An advancing army is worth far more than a retreating army of twice its size. The difference is in morale. In expectation. A retreating army expects to be beaten. An advancing army expects to win.
Map that analogy onto countries and ideologies. Consider how conservative political parties act in almost every country. As if they expect to be beaten. They expect it because they lost that sense of historical inevitability. The Goldwater campaign challenged Democratic voting blocs with, "In your heart you know he's right". Today most conservative parties 'know' in their hearts that the left is right. They quibble with their tactics and nitpick the implementation, but they have come to agree on the basic ideas.
In the US and the UK, the Republicans and the Tories are willing to agree to every one of the left's cultural agendas, as long as they're allowed to make some cuts in the budget. In Israel, Netanyahu is doing a fantastic job on the economy, while arguing that he should be allowed to carve up Israel on the installment plan, not in one lump sum. Imagine if after the Battle of Saratoga, the American colonies had agreed to go back under King George III's rule, as long as George Washington was made Finance Minister with the authority to review the books. We won't need to worry about the cultural war or restoring some sense of purpose to the nation, once we've trimmed 11 percent off the expendables budget.
This is the species of absurd madness we are dealing with here-- because even when they win elections, conservative parties act like losers, determined to prove that they aren't the bad guys. That they are tolerant, decent and generous. Good losers in short.
One of Holmes' students, a young man named Clair Patterson, began a project in 1948 to determine the ultimate age of the Earth once and for all. The problem at this point was not with the dating method; the problem was finding the right thing to date. In order to have the final word on the matter, you needed to date the oldest rock on the planet. How would you know when you found it? Patterson found a way around this. Instead of dating something in the ground, he dated something from the sky—a meteorite.
Gwynnie went to Rawley's last week because it's close to her favorite gunsmith, just around the back of the Sturm Ruger plant on the Southport border.
Got there at 11:45 and so missed the legendary 20-minute wait for a deep-fried hot dog and fabulous skin-on fries. The booths are so covered with carved initials, names and dates it's hard to imagine they are still standing. Inside and out are signs touting the joint's approval by none other than Martha Stewart, a bit uncommon among weenie joints!!
"Rawley's is located west of the center of Fairfield on a rather plain stretch of road that runs alongside high-tension wires and railroad tracks, befitting the working-class feel of this dining spot. In a way, Rawley's has a similar feel to Blackie's in Cheshire (a ways north of Fairfield), in that it is a classic roadside stand housed in a rather forlorn-looking spot, though Blackie's is admittedly in a much more rural setting. But both reside in structures that look more like houses than commercial buildings, both have very old, dark seating areas inside (including counter seating with stools), and both feature some of the best hot dogs and hamburgers in the area.
"Although Rawley's serves a handful of different items, including chicken sandwiches and burgers, the hot dogs are perhaps the biggest draw, as they are deep-fried rather than grilled (as they are cooked at Super Duper Weenie), giving them an outstanding mix of crunchiness on the outside and juiciness on the inside. They can be ordered with a number of toppings, including cheese, chili, and something called "hellish relish," which is fairly hot and very delicious, with a mix of ingredients including onions and peppers. For those who aren't looking for hot dogs, the griddled burgers here are also excellent, with the high fat content of the thin patties giving them a ton of flavor. The crispy and fresh handcut fries are also decent, and go perfectly with the burgers and dogs. One other item of note at Rawley's is the superb milkshake, which is thick and rich, yet not overly syrupy or sweet."
"Robert Dulka of Fairfield said he started eating at Rawley's more than 20 years ago, when he was in high school. "I come in when I feel like being a little kid and eating everything in the world that isn't good for me," he said. "I'll worry about the fat and cholesterol later." "Another long-time customer, Linda Amos, said, "It's a lot of fun bringing people here for the first time. Everybody always says the same thing -- that it's like taking a trip back to the 1950's."
"Mr. Bielik [ed. the owner] said a number of celebrities have stopped in over the years, including Paul Newman, Dennis Quaid, Meg Ryan, Mike Wallace, Phil Simms and Joe Namath. But Mr. Bielik said he's so busy making sure the hot dog buns are toasted properly that he usually doesn't notice until other customers make a commotion. "I took David Letterman's order a few years ago and I didn't even know who he was," Mr. Bielik said. "Look, even the rich and famous have to stand in line here, like everybody else."
"For all of Rawley's ambiance, customers say it's the hot dogs that bring them back. Bruce Bunch, who helped establish the Fairfield County Chapter of the Weenie Wanderers to search for the perfect hot dog, thinks he has figured out the secret. "Chico uses Roessler's hot dogs, which are 100 percent meat, deep fries the dogs, and cooks them until they are grilled brown" atop the stove, said Mr. Bunch, a public relations manager for General Electric in Fairfield. "He also toasts the buns perfectly, and with some mustard, relish and bacon -- well, all I can say is that our group doesn't wander any more," he said. "We just go to Rawley's, get Booth No. 2, and it just doesn't get any better than that."
Oh, sure, you think 'alternative energy' is corny or worthless or just downright silly, right? And the worst form of all is that goofy solar power, right?
Maybe you're just not using it for the right application.
The suit uses conductive thread and thin photo-voltaic panels, creating a sort of chain-mail fabric that gives the bikini a medieval armor-meets-21st century look. The solar power absorbed by the panels charges any gadget that can be plugged into the suit's USB ports, sewn right into the fabric.
Schneider is in the process of creating a men's swimsuit using the same technology to chill beers, cutely-dubbed the iDrink.
Article is here, and a big hat tip to Maggie's Valued Reader™ John who runs On The North River.
Every prognosticator on television news shows is proved wrong about everything within a week's time. Paul Krugman can't predict what's going to happen at dinnertime while he's having lunch. Newspapers can't even tell you what already happened. But a bunch of clowns in 1979 got it about right. Americathon:
They miscast a John Edwards lookalike as President Chet Roosevelt instead of an Obama clone, but they did predict that China would go capitalist, so we'll give them a pass. I wonder if we'll try going capitalist anytime soon? You know, after the telethon.
Yes, you do have one of those psychobabble things.
Your inner child is selfish, self-centered, greedy, jealous, envious, angry, spiteful, grudge-bearing, hyper-sensitive; feels deprived, entitled, fearful, passive-aggressive, and often destructive. It's a nasty thing and results in misery (for others) in life.
My general advice is to avoid being "in touch with" one's inner child as much as possible. Reaching down and finding one's inner adult is a much better plan.
Last year’s choice by my alma mater CUNY’s Brooklyn College of the sole Common Reading book distributed to all incoming students for discussion and work in required English classes was particularly marred by the author’s additionsof anti-US and anti-Israel comments and statistics that were radical and fraudulent. I had a rolein raising the issue to national attention and criticism.
This year’s choice – Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat -- probably won’t raise as many hackles, as the focus is less a prominent political hotspot, Haiti. That may indicate welcome increased sensitivity by the selection committee, but this year’s choice still suffers most of the deficiencies as last year’s.
The book’s primary theme is the author’s upbringing in Haiti, separated from her parents who had immigrated to the US, she and brothers later joining them, and the relations among the extended family. However, the book’s critical attitude toward the US role in Haiti’s sad history of violence, poverty and instability, and the death in immigration detention of the author’s aged uncle, are strong secondary themes that provide the mileau for the tale.
One may argue that these are the author’s acquired views in this personal narrative. But, the prominence of those secondary themes brings the book, and the college, directly into major current political arguments over broader US foreign and immigration policies. This slant is in stark contrast to the author’s reflections exclusion of gratitude to the US for the youngsters’ success in the US. She is an acclaimed writer, her brothers also established in white collar jobs at the time of writing the book. Further, the book does not provide enough political context to allow a better understanding of the author’s criticisms of US policies in Haiti or US immigration practices.
In short, the book is part of the “victimology” and Leftist memoir literature so popular among our liberal elite, compared to earlier immigrants’ books about thankfully escaping repression and poverty in their countries of birth, then struggling and succeeding in the freedoms in the US.
That isn’t to say there isn’t enough in the book to show the horrible conditions in Haiti, that reading between the lines shows the youngsters’ success in the US, that an autopsy of the 81-year old uncle’s death revealed the cause as a previously unknown pancreatic condition, or that the author’s grandfather and uncle had been rebels and the family’s politics aligned with critics of the US in Haiti.
The book is still a poor choice for launching discussion of the political issues raised by the author. It is marred by the underlying anger of the author and her lack of appreciation of the US, her presentation of the US as an oppressive presence in the consciousness of her family, and the lack of underlying contextual details about US foreign and immigration policies. The incoming student will likely read or hear in the classroom discussions little else about the issues from broader or conflicting perspectives or facts.
Amongthe laudatory comments by some Brooklyn College faculty for the book, a senior professor there – Robert Cherry -- raises some of the problems with the book:
Family Tales in the Service of a Political Agenda
Brother, I’m Dying has little about the daily life of Haitians; their jobs, social and cultural institutions. Instead, Danticat focuses on violent episodes in Haitian history: Trujillo’s killings on the Dominican border; U.S. occupation, Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes repression, and Haitian riot policy behavior. Rather than providing the reader with detailed information, Danticat chooses to promote emotional outrage by presenting tales of family members that accompany each of the episodes.
How true are the tales she has been told? How much has she embellished these accounts? What we do know is that telling these tales as first‐person accounts make them seem factual and puts faces and lives onto important episodes in Haitian history. In particular, Brother, I Am Dying uses Danticat’s family’s tales to invest its reader with emotional outrage at U.S. Haitian policy.
For me, this became clear when she placed Uncle Joseph’s childhood tale after this chilling account of his death in a US immigration detention center. Danticat writes, “Fearing that he might be captured by the Americans to work in the labor camps … Granpe Nozial ordered him to never go down the mountain.” Family illness, however, forced Joseph to seek medicine in town where he sees [US Marines] “white men …kicking the thing on the ground as though it was a soccer ball to one and other with the round tips of their boots. Taking small steps to stand the same distance away as other bystanders, my uncle finally saw what it was: a man’s head.” Thus, from the beginning of his life until its end, Joseph experienced first hand the inhumanity of U.S. policies towards Haitians.
While I sympathize with her pain, and even sympathize with her political agenda, it does not negate my concerns. Absence its political agenda, the book offers little to inform us about the Haitian experience. Brother, I’m Dying should be supplemented by panel discussions of the important issues it raises: U.S. Haitian policy, Immigration Detention Centers, and the issues children face when they are reunited with their parents in the U.S. when they are teenagers.
Professor Cherry informs me that the English Department is considering such discussions. If so, one may expect the Left and liberal leanings of the English Department faculty to emphasize the charges of economic imperialism prompting the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934, but notthat the dominance of its economy by German immigrants was feared in the midst of WWI, the huge building of infrastructure there by the US, or that its liberal constitution was written by then Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt.
One may expect the criticisms by pro-immigration lobbies that detention practices are substandard and harsh, but not that the deaths from all causes in detention are a tiny fraction of detainees (about 107 out of over 2.5 million, about 5 per 10,000, during 2003-2008; even the January 2010 New York Times reportof critics says, “In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.”). The Center for Immigration Studies, opposed to liberal immigration policies, contendsthis is a much lower rate of death than in US prisons. The comparison, however, raises many apples and oranges measurement difficulties that need to be clarified. Both sides agree that many improvements to detention policies and practices have been made in the past six-years, after the author’s uncle died in detention, and both sides agree that there is much – if differing – that needs to be done. – Of note here is that the author’s 81-year old uncle, with a valid visa to enter the US, was fleeing gangs that wanted to behead him and asked for temporary political asylum instead of just entering the US on his visa and overstaying it as so many do, so he entered the detention-adjudication system for a few days, dying there from a previously unknown pancreatic condition despite blood/urine and scan tests provided.
I’ll add a personal note. The apartment that the author’s parents lived in was in my Flatbush neighborhood in Brooklyn, less that 20-years later. I walked a mile to Prospect Park. Their apartment was a block away from the park. The apartment buildings where her parents lived were considered much better than the one in which I was raised. The author’s father was a tailor who in the US became a gypsy cab driver. He raised and educated successful children. My poor immigrant grandparents were, also, tailors, who sewed until retirement for poor health in their ‘60s, and raised and educated a successful family (my aunt was in the first classes at the new Brooklyn College). I drove a cab on graveyard shifts while at Brooklyn College, and like the author’s father was mugged. We were raised to be appreciative of the freedoms and opportunities in the US. It seems that the author of Brooklyn College’s 2011 Common Reading is less so. That is a distinct problem plaguing colleges and the US today.
We are trying, with no help and a lot of opposition, to produce decent, productive, ethical, moral, well-read, arithmetically capable, ambitious, vigorous, funny, kind, intellectually curious, self-regulating adults. And the only question anyone has for us is: how can we live with ourselves, knowing we're keeping our children from the wonders of attending the White Dwarf Star Academy.
Somehow we manage to bear up under the shame of it.
I haven't thought about this old-timey Yankee diner dessert for many years, but someone brought it up the other day, and I am now hungry for one.
As I recall, the last time I had a slice of one was at a diner with my grandfather. Cannot think about the pie without remembering that polo- and poker-playing, shootin', fishin' slacker gramps of mine, who preferred shopping for horses, and dealing in sailboats and Elco yachts (leaving his real business to others) to regular work - and who died way too young of a series of MIs, at 63.
Boston Cream Pie is Yankee-simple, unfashionable, unsophisticated, and darn tasty, and it's a cake, not a pie, with potent if short-lasting anti-depressant properties.
You can make it yourself if you can't find it in stores. Easy to do.
The last fad diagnosis was ADHD: every little boy who didn't act like a good little girl had it. Now, it is Bipolar Disorder for all kids with unruly emotions. In Newsweek, Mommy, Am I Really Bipolar?
A quote from the article:
I believe... that there is no scientific evidence to support the belief that bipolar disorder surfaces in childhood. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case: the evidence against the existence of pediatric bipolar disorder is so strong that it’s difficult to imagine how it has gained the endorsement of anyone in the scientific community. And the effect of this trendy thinking can have devastating consequences. Such children are regularly prescribed medications that are not effective in kids and have unwelcome side effects.
Diagnostic faddishness is rampant in Psychiatry, and an embarassment to the field. Why does it occur? It occurs because our descriptive diagnostic categories are so elastic, and so fundamentally unvalidated, that there is room for much mischief. Not to mention that the drug companies always welcome new opportunities to sell their wares.
Unlike most of the world, I am not allowed to have the Process be the Product. At the end of the day there has to be something tangibly different with the world or we don't eat. Sometimes we don't eat anyway. Most of the world we inhabit now is all Process and no Product. What is Twitter, or Tumblr, or Facebook, or a million other things you could name that consist solely of: This is how I go, when I go like this.
The federal government thinks the process is the entire product. The public school system can produce only public school teachers. The EPA is now supposed to protect the air from humans. The Department of Energy doesn't make any, and would prefer you didn't as well --or else. Cities like Detroit are trying to exist with no population now. Search your mind. You'll have to search hard to find exceptions, not examples.
Liberals...have never had any strong attachment to state sovereignty. Since the New Deal, they have regarded centralized power as the best way to advance the welfare state. They may favor state discretion when it favors their causes. But they don't pretend to be consistent on the issue.
Conservatives, however, do. Pretend, that is. When there is a conflict between state sovereignty and conservative policies, their reverence for the 10th Amendment abruptly goes by the wayside.
That became apparent several years ago, when the Bush administration asserted its power to prevent Californians from using medical marijuana after the state allowed it. It also tried to block an Oregon law allowing doctor-assisted suicide. Attorney General John Ashcroft had no qualms about mobilizing the fearsome resources of the federal government when states veered out of line.
He has new company among the GOP presidential aspirants, who support the 10th Amendment except when they don't. When New York legalized same-sex marriage, Perry first said, "That's New York, and that's their business, and that's fine with me." But he soon reversed course, endorsing the Federal Marriage Amendment, which says marriage "shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman."
We support states' rights and state sovereignty. Country too big, too varied, too diverse, for a one-size fits-all.
Naturally, police never know what they are walking into and would be more comfortable if nobody had guns - or knives or baseball bats either - but Chief McCarthy is way out of reality. A quote:
..the culture of any given community will determine its level of violence, with gun laws making a minor difference at best. The devastating cultural changes impacting society -- and the black community in particular -- during the 1960s are largely to blame for the violence we see. Political scientist James Q. Wilson summed up that cultural change perfectly, saying, "[P]eople abandoned the idea that self-control was the standard by which life should be led." The current conditions on the South Side and in ghettos around America are a direct result of generation upon generation of excuses -- wrapped up in social-science garb, righteous indignation, and racial sensitivity -- but excuses all the same. The young men committing violent crimes today have been steeped in generational irresponsibility, and Chicago's police superintendant has kept up the flow.
Most people in my community own guns (legally), but we have not had a murder here in 70 years. And that was done by an intruder, from outside town.
From the I wish I had Written This Department: Voegli's 
Yes, you do have one of those psychobabble things.
I haven't thought about this old-timey Yankee diner dessert for many years, but someone brought it up the other day, and I am now hungry for one. 
Gateway reminded me of this one: 
Are racist white gun owners