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.
Listen to Prof. Vedder's interview. I always enjoy Vedder, and he nails it.
A college degree is not an entitlement to a "good job" - whatever that is. People are confused about what college is. Is it a paper credential, job preparation, citizen-building, or simple life-enrichment? Certainly a Liberal Arts degree is the latter.
Since posting my E. 4th St. pics yesterday, I've been looking at some NYC real estate - for fun, not to buy. The East Village is by no means a fancy area. I focused on E. 4th because that's where I took my pics on Sunday.
They are asking a mere $519,000 for this 600 sq foot 1 1/2 bedoom on the 5th floor of a walk-up. Great for your legs, those 5th-floors:
I could not find a single available rental on E. 4th, but maybe I didn't try enough. Still, demand is strong. I think many of the young folk are doubling and tripling up to make their rents with the average 2 BR walk-up running from $4000/month and up - and in elevator buildings up to $10,000/mo - in this funky old neighborhood which was considered a semi-slum some years back.
I remember it well - Mrs. BD attended Tisch (before she was Mrs. BD, and when it was known as NYU School of the Arts and was housed in a huge old industrial loft building with only a freight elevator, yet was still maybe second only to Juilliard for the performing arts). The Fillmore East was there too, and I have memories of that: Leon Russell, Allman Brothers, Dr. John, etc.
Looking at the listings makes me wonder who all these people are who want to pay, or are able to pay, $10,000/month rent for smallish apartments in the East Village (referring to east of Greenwich Village).
And looking at the listings reminds me that, if you live in Manhattan and do not have money to burn to spend on housing, you sleep in your apartment - you don't live in it. You live at your gym or club or pub or cafe or library or park or meetings or dinners or work or wherever. Otherwise, the claustrophobia can get pretty ugly for those who are not used to it. I think so many New Yorkers run and jog and bike just to get the heck out of their little boxes.
Funny, though, when I think that I probably spend 90% of my time at home within 10% of my home living space - but that is by choice.
I confess, Readers, that I still get a kick out of New York. Vital, colorful, messy, unpredictable, and jam-packed with talented people.
The Ryan proposal will help settle the fight over the government shutdown and the 2011 budget because it will remind everybody that the real argument is not about cutting a few billion here or there. It is about the underlying architecture of domestic programs in 2012 and beyond.
The Ryan budget will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.
From the standpoint of traditional calculations of national interest, this war is something akin to madness. Yet without fully articulating it (and that reticence is intentional), Obama and Power are attempting to accustom us to a whole new way of thinking about war, and about America’s place in the world.
I am a subject in a kingdom of lies. At 57, I have grown up with decades of untruth — advanced for the purposes of purported social unity, the noble aim of egalitarianism, and the advancement of a cognitive elite in government, journalism, the arts, and the universities.
At college campuses across the US, student organizations that attack Israel have become more and more active, and obnoxious, over the past decade. The members are drawn from some of the Moslem students and their far leftist companions. Most students are there to get an education, or at least get their degree ticket punched. While there's little evidence these anti-Israel groups have much support, through their activism they load student governments and with their loud voices they usually dominate campus debates.
Over the past year or so, at many campuses Jewish groups have formed to counter this vileness. Others of sound minds have joined in.
The University of California, San Diego is one of the top-ranked academic campuses in the country. This week a group of professors joined together to call BS on the anti-Israel groups.
Dr. David Feifel, a professor at UCSD and Vice President of the UCSD SPME (Scholars for Peace in the Middle East) chapter, wrote a powerful editorial about the hypocrisy on campus relating to the Arab and Muslim students' focus on Israel Apartheid Week and their failure to acknowledge the suffering of the Arabs being murdered for demonstrating for democracy in Arab countries. Shockingly, the UCSD Guardian newspaper after an initial acceptance, at the final hour refused to run the editorial. So, the professors had to take out a full page ad which today featured the editorial with 28 signatures of UCSD Professors.
The editorial is below the fold. It is quite educational, and directly confronts the hypocrisy of the on campus anti-Israel groups for actually not giving much of a darn for oppressed Arabs but, instead being preoccupied with vilifying Israel.
These strong counters need to be spread to every other college campus. Please distribute this post to students and professors at other campuses.
Our crack(ed?) technical team at Maggie’s Farm (actually another secret CIA “farm”) has intercepted a secret personal letter just sent by former President George Bush to President Barack Obama.
Dear President Obama:
I’ve kept a respectful public silence about your administration, as you’ve kept silent in contacting me for my experience or any advise. But, I can no longer restrain my urge to thank you for vindicating many of my policies which you criticized during and since your campaign for the presidency.
Yes, I made some mistakes, and corrected some of them. You too have made some mistakes. I wish you the best of luck to correct them.
I must admit that I envy the better position that you are in to do so. I had to manage against a Democrat Congress and hostile press. You now have fewer Democrats to deal with in Congress, many more Republicans now there who are eager to support you with needed policies, and a press which has proven its loyalty to whatever you say.
May I suggest several areas in which you might take advantage of this favorable situation:
I pulled a few nice trout out of this beat in Connecticut on Saturday:
Here's my recipe:
4 to 6 trout (approximately 1/2 lb. each), 3 Tablespoons lemon juice, 1 teaspoon coarse (kosher) salt (or to your taste), 2 cloves minced garlic (or to your taste), 2 bottles of fine Sauvignon Blanc, 2 Tablespoons Italian parsley, 2 Tablespoons chopped green onion, 2 Tablespoons dry seasoned bread crumbs, 4 Tablespoons melted butter.
Wash and dry trout. Rub the outside of trout with lemon juice and sprinkle with salt. Reserve half the wine (1 cup) into an appropriate stemmed glass.Retain the base wine for step 3.Sample the reserved wine.
Arrange the minced garlic in the bottom of a buttered baking dish that is large enough to hold the trout in a single layer.Check the reserved wine for flavor.
Place trout in the dish and pour the base wine over the top. Double-check the reserved wine.
Sprinkle with parsley, green onion, and bread crumbs. Spoon the melted butter evenly over the top. Test the reserved wine for spoilage.
Ceremonially empty the reserve wine container and bake trout at 400 degrees for 20 minutes.
Makes 4 to 6 servings. Open the second chilled bottle to serve with the fish.
...consider a student who arrives for the first day of class and sees a professor who resembles a 1960s hippy-like graduate student (Levis, rumpled un-tucked shirt etc.) and if male, scraggly facial hair wearing a baseball cap and if female, tacky “folk” jewelry and a permanent bad hair day? It could be worse—the political billboard tee-shirt to remind today’s uninformed youngsters that “Bush Lied and People Died.” It makes no difference that this instructor may have a doctorate from Harvard and is being fast tracked to an endowed chair. Cultural conditioning is inescapable and ubiquitous: respect is given to those who dress the part and when they refuse, deference is not forthcoming. Professors should not look like janitors or stand-up comics. A sky-high tuition bill only adds insult to injury—$40,000 or more in tuition to hear superannuated hippies?
Pics from yesterday afternoon. The East Village (not to mention the Lower East Side) has become a wonderful, youthful neighborhood, and the old walk-up "tenements" seem just fine abodes for the youth who flock to NYC although they lack the doormen, gyms with pools, laundry rooms etc. that the new buildings offer. The rents, alas, are not cheap in these old places -
For the left, it provided long-term goals, criteria for distinguishing progress from retreat in making short-term compromises, and a kind of definition of the just society. For the right, it was a foil to be combated and averted — an archetype of soulless, stifling bureaucratic hubris — and it helped put objections to seemingly modest individual leftward steps into a broader, more coherent context. But both ends of our politics seemed implicitly to agree that, left to its own momentum, this is where our country was headed — where history would take us if no one stood athwart it yelling stop.
This post feels like an idiotic Tweet, but that makes for a pretty solid day even though I seem to have a fever with sweats and chills. I just want to set a good example.... Each day is a gift, and I hate to waste a single one. I pruned the heck out of that old tree this year because I went too easy on it last year: the less fruit, the sweeter the yield. Better late than never. The bunnies are already gnawing the bark of my cuttings, despite my guard dog.
Name the maker of this very nice rare smoke a friend kindly gave to me the other day (our readers can name the bird easily). Smoke is a Ligero, but what maker?
9:1 As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth.
9:2 His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"
9:3 Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him.
9:4 We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work.
9:5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world."
9:6 When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes,
9:7 saying to him, "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see.
9:8 The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, "Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?"
9:9 Some were saying, "It is he." Others were saying, "No, but it is someone like him." He kept saying, "I am the man."
9:10 But they kept asking him, "Then how were your eyes opened?"
9:11 He answered, "The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, 'Go to Siloam and wash.' Then I went and washed and received my sight."
9:12 They said to him, "Where is he?" He said, "I do not know."
9:13 They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind.
9:14 Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes.
9:15 Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, "He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see."
The newfound fervor for human rights among liberal supporters of President Obama’s “kinetic” enterprise in Libya might be better turned to Vietnam. Instead, ignoring the persecution of minorities there and ongoing – indeed, increasing – repression of dissent, they fall into line with US businesses profiting from cheap Vietnamese labor to look away. We ally with Middle East foes of freedom and abandon real seekers of freedom in Vietnam.
During the Vietnam War, the Montagnards -- Vietnam’s Central Highlands hill people, a distinct ethnic and cultural group different than the majority lowland Vietnamese – became strong allies in fighting against the communists. They had long wanted autonomy within Vietnam, and seeking their support Saigon granted them many of their requests.
Since 1975, the communist government of Vietnam has ruthlessly persecuted the Montagnards, imprisoning, torturing, murdering many and taking their lands for roads, plantations and mines, denuding the forests for valuable woods, moving the Montagnards from poverty to rootless impoverishment and loss of culture. Together with many within the government, those with connections and Chinese state businesses profit.
Many Montagnards are devout Protestants, Degar, whose churches are not recognized by the state and whose members come in for particularly harsh punishments. The Montagnard Foundation is their voice in the West, documenting and exposing their persecution. Few listen and fewer care, least of all the US government. Under both presidents Bush and Obama, the US government has looked away, with the myth that somehow Vietnam would be a counterweight to China but actually favoring US businesses that also profit from trade with Vietnam.
I’ve frequently written about this. (See, for example, these at a previous website.) My friend Scott Johnson is a lawyer, writer and human rights activist focusing on tribal peoples from South East Asia. His latest article, awaiting publication, focuses on cables from our ambassador to Vietnam that came to light in the WikiLeaks. The cables in question are from US Ambassador to Vietnam Michael Michalak titled, Vietnam Religious Freedom Update. “Essentially the leaked confidential cables are a testament of betrayal as they blatantly fail to mention the hundreds of tribal Christian Montagnards or Degar people imprisoned in Vietnam….It’s as if the hundreds of Montagnard prisoners never existed….”
Medical schools, these days, are up to around 50% diligent, perfect-student, rule-abiding boring females. Tons of Asians, too. Doctors are no longer mainly the smart Jewish guys and the patrician WASPy guys of the past.
The Association of American Medical Schools wants to change the tests for more diversity. As such things tend to be, I'd guess they want more black and Mexican kids and more gays, and fewer grade-grubbing Asians and white girls.
If I recall, it was a while ago that they changed their tests: they eliminated the "General Information" part of the MCAT, which dealt with history, literature, psychology, culture, etc. That change must have altered the general make-up of medical school classes too: more science nerds and fewer of the potentially-wise priestly class.
But maybe that's what people want from docs these days: expert technicians. It's not for me. I want expertise, but with a heart and soul and some wisdom and flexibility.
It will be airline pilots, next in line, for all of this.
Richard Goldstone's report For the UN on Israel's Cast Lead incursion into Gaza in December and January 2008-2009 has been used by those antagonistic to Israel to charge that Israel acted wantonly against civilians. In Goldstone's Emily Litella moment, his op-ed in the Washington Post says "never mind." As summarized at CNN: "On Gaza, Goldstone essentially says that if he'd known then what he knows now, the report would not have been nearly so hard on Israel." William Jacobson sums that up: "Richard Goldstone Confirms He Was A Useful Idiot."
At the time, Israel and fair-minded governments and individuals carefully exposed the Goldstone Report's bias, distortions and reliance on pro-Hamas sources. This website presents the facts, ignored by the Goldstone Report. The New Republic, a liberal magazine, in a lengthy evaluation of "The Goldstone Illusion", concludes with:
The Goldstone Report as a whole is a terrible document. It is biased and unfair. It offers no help in sorting out the real issues. What methods can Israel--and other countries in similar situations--legitimately apply in the defense of their citizens? To create standards of morality in war that leave a state without the means of legitimate self-protection is politically foolish and morally problematic; but real answers to these real problems cannot be found in the Goldstone Report. What should Israel do when Hezbollah’s more lethal and accurate missiles strike the center of Tel Aviv, causing hundreds of civilian deaths? It is a well-known fact that these missiles are in Hezbollah’s possession, and, when they are fired, it will be from populated villages in Lebanon.
We'll not be holding our breath for apologies from the UN or leftist commentators who praised the Goldstone Report. Indeed, they'll hurl the same spurious charges next time, as every time.
P.S.: Tell us what you really think, John Podhoretz:
That Richard Goldstone did not know in 2009 that Hamas is a terrorist monstrosity which functions parasitically off civilian populaces while Israel is a beacon of war-fighting restraint in a manner practically unknown in the course of human history suggests even more plainly than the report itself that he is a dupe, a fool, a clown, and a worldwide embarrassment. Not to mention a special kind of reprehensible and appalling figure of inglorious, hideous shame to his own people through the delivery and promulgation of a false document that helped anti-Semites everywhere feel themselves justified.
He was then, and is now, an entirely despicable public figure—and so is his op-ed, by the way, which continues to act as though it is appropriate to draw parallel inferences about Hamas and the state of Israel. It would be right for world Jewry that his name be hereafter summoned as we summon Benedict Arnold’s, or Tokyo Rose’s.
On the other hand, or in addition, see this. But, if Goldstone was ignorant or dumb enough to be "rolled" he didn't belong there in the first place, and his mea culpa while nice to have doesn't undo the damage he wrought and furthered. -- Following Goldstone's recent speaking tour at Berkeley, this observation:
Attempting to justify his decision to proceed with the report, Goldstone has claimed to have been given a revised mandate by the rotating UNHRC president. This is clearly false. Of the "36 incidents" investigated by Goldstone, not one relates to the thousands of Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza, each a war crime targeting Israeli citizens....In his Berkeley presentation, Goldstone reportedly stated that "the powerful don't like to be looked at and judged." Goldstone is a powerful individual, and in failing to address the overwhelming and substantive criticism -- and moving far too slowly, if at all, to correct the enormous damage that he has caused -- Judge Goldstone continues to abuse his power.
"For Koran-buring"? Give me a break. It's the fault of some jerk in Florida? No. Just an excuse to go berserko and behead some filthy infidels. Muslims or anybody can burn all the Bibles they want. I don't care, and I won't want to harm anybody - I would just feel sorry for them. These are killers looking for excuses, and any excuse will do. That's just the way killers are: they kill because they are killers.
VDH's piece
John 9:1-41
Medical schools, these days, are up to around 50% diligent, perfect-student, rule-abiding boring females. Tons of Asians, too. Doctors are no longer mainly the smart Jewish guys and the patrician WASPy guys of the past.