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.
Why New York's future is fleeing -- Actually, its future has been fleeing since the ‘60s and ‘70s. When I left, NYC was THE only crazy city to live, as sanity was sought elsewhere. The infection has spread to most other cities. Many of the NYC emigres carried it, along with their liberal politics.
The Dems' 'breathtaking' refusal to pass a budget: “The most amazing thing about all this, to Republicans, is that Reid’s abdication of responsibility has attracted so little attention. In a country drowning in debt, where’s the outrage?” – Senate Democrats:Bujeets! We don’t need no steenken bujeets
The Keynesian end point --The truth? "QE2 has created a massive new bubble in dollar-based financial assets, from stocks to gold. Meanwhile, it has had zero visible effect on the real economy."
How the Left Went Wrong on Islam: “The Soviet Union had tried to turn Muslim identity into a Communist identity. And that effort failed badly. The Communists remained infidels. Now we are trying to turn Muslim identity into a Democratic identity, and failing just as miserably.”
Prediction: In September, President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy blows up in his (and our) face(s). It’s totally obvious and yet no one is focusing on it.
I’m not referring to the Palestinian Authority’s bid for unilateral independence at the UN. I’m referring to the Egyptian parliamentary election.
It is totally obvious that in that election Egypt will elect a radical, anti-American, hate-Israel parliament which will then write the country’s new constitution….
On the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the United States will be watching the triumph of the ideology and movement--not Usama bin Ladin, of course, but his smarter counterparts--in much of the Middle East.
PS: Here's an excellent guide to Egypt's political parties so far which proves my point . Note that there isn't a single serious moderate party. Amr Mousa isn't forming a party while Muhammad ElBaradei, Obama's favorite, isn't doing anything but complain. There is a "Facebook party." So far it has 1000 "likes." Egypt has about 85 million people.
Bipartisan foreign policy: “House lawmakers from both parties are siding with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over President Obama in their differing approaches to the Israel-Palestine border dispute.” – Plus, Netanyahu gets more standing ovations than Obama, and without a teleprompter Netanyahu actually connects with authenticity.
C.S. Lewis once wrote that "of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." Rulers who just want to exploit us may relax once their greed's sated.
But "those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience," Lewis said.
They've been saying "The 60's are over" for years. And now, for Mr. Bob Dylan, they finally are.
Ol' Bob turns 70 today.
Pic: Not a recent photograph
There's a decent little article on him here, and lots of birthday links here.
Bob Dylan can agitate people — much like the way he used to when he was in his 20s and being branded as “Judas” for daring to play loud rock music to folk-loving audiences.
I'll say. Most people I knew would have been happy to put a knife through his eye for dragging an electric guitar onto the stage. In the world of folk music, there can be no greater blasphemy.
On the flip side, if it hadn't been for electrics, we never would have been blessed with 'Blood On The Tracks', my personal fave Dylan LP*.
*For those of you under 50, 'LP' stands for 'Long Playing', as in "record album", as in "vinyl", as in "precursor to the frisbee", as in "the worst form of storage media ever used in the history of the universe after aluminum foil canisters." However, simply because they were so fragile, we treated them like gold, thus imparting a certain feeling of 'personal protection' over our music stars; a feeling you certainly don't get in the throwaway world of CDs and memory sticks.
The way I see it, the reason Dylan successfully pulled off the switch to electrics is twofold. The main thing was that, even with electric guitars and drum sets banging away in the background, they still sounded like Dylan songs. Credit his squeaky voice and simplistic chord structure if you will, but it was actually a little deeper than that. Maybe it would be more appropriate to say that, despite the guitars and drums, his songs were still Dylanesque. That 'intangible something' was still there. And that, in the final analysis, was all that mattered.
But another reason is, while he used electric instruments, he never 'went electric' like the way so many bands did, bringing in moog synthesizers and fuzz guitar and electronic sitars and all the rest. He was still, in that final analysis, the quintessential Dylan we had known and loved for years.
Squeaky voice, simplistic chord structure, and all.
Well, so are all dog breeds, until someone gives them a breed name. But Brittanys aren't really true Spaniels (here are the main spaniel varieties - more of 'em than you might have thought), which is why we call them plain Brittanys. They are more pointers, or setters, or something. A mix of various random things that happened to come together well.
Who cares what you call them. In our neck of the woods, Brittanys are the best all-purpose dog for the field, and maybe the most popular gun dog. They point birds, they retrieve, they do not mind water retrieves; they are bundles of energy and affection, and they are easy to train - a cross look is usually enough to get your point across to these emotionally-sensitive critters. The larger American version can handle the large spaces.
But you need at least two of them. One Brittany isn't a fully happy dog. They need the exercise and the company they can give each other. Every hunter, or every human, can use a few sweet Brittanys around the place.
The audience:Wiseguy member of the media joked, “If he nuked Tel Aviv, maybe the Jewish vote would go down to 60 percent.” [He forgets that Reagan won 40% and Bush#2 35%, before President O alienated more.]– And, Jewish support for Israel is not declining.And, consciousness is rising. So, another solid 2008 O-group will not be so overwhelming in 2012. Ari Fleisher: “If Jews go 4-1 Democrat (as they did in 2008) Republicans lose, he says, but: If the Democrats win three to one it almost always tips it to the Republicans in Florida and Ohio.” – Isolationists among Republicans –Paul, for example- do not help, though.
There are journalism awards that honor great journalism. There are journalism awards with which one can argue. And then there are journalism awards that completely discredit the awarding entity itself. This is one of those latter category of awards.
“The Amsterdam court that is trying Mr. Wildersis engaged in a surgical operation for political purposes under the mandate of the Dutch ruling class. Its task is to excise the PVV leader from the Dutch body politic and restore the multicultural state to its previous dominance.”
Interesting parallels to today (1989 paper by a dear friend Miriam London, and wife to another dear friend Ivan London, both profs during my college days)
Like some Soviet experts before them, on whom they cast no backward glance, they were practitioners of the intellectual pseudo-faith of the century, dreaming up the City of Perfect Justice on Earth.
More useless gov't: “This is major expansion of government -- a separate branch of the Federal Reserve with immense powers to regulate "all consumer products." The excuse for it is bogus…”
Irony Meter Explodes: California, which imprisons 30,000 illegal immigrants, ordered to release 30,000 prisoners due to overcrowding – But, California likely to release the ill prisoners, who will then start collecting MediCal, shifting billions of costs back to Washington.
We know, for example, that when a patient goes to his primary-care physician with a very common problem like lower back pain, the physician will deliver the right treatment with real clinical benefit about half of the time. Patients with the same health problem who go to different physicians will get wildly different treatments. Those physicians can't all be right.
Overall, physicians are said to get it wrong around 50% of the time. I suppose that is possible. I get it wrong on a regular basis. Dr. DB says he trusts no-one in medicine, including himself.
More from the Scientific American article:
Give surgeons a written description of a surgical problem, and half of the group will recommend surgery, while the other half will not. Survey them again two years later and as many as 40 percent of the same surgeons will disagree with their previous opinions and change their recommendations. Research studies back up all of these findings, according to Eddy.
Everything is a crisis these days, and this is not one either. Much of college education has little to do with the workplace, and most practical education is self-education. Still, the author is open to the sorts of educational flexibility that make sense.
Princeton's Neili has a major piece responding to the Chace piece on affirmative action which we posted a while ago. It's A Desperate Defense of Affirmative Action. One quote:
Our current preference system has all the perverse kind of contact effects that Allport feared to the extent that it assures, in the very nature of upward-ratcheting, that the typical black or Hispanic student at highly competitive colleges and universities will be less academically accomplished or less academically talented than the typical white or Asian student. The very logic of the system guarantees this result. It's the "dumb jock" problem cast into an ethno-racial mold. Just as the lowering of standards for recruited athletes results in a reinforcement of the association between "dumb" and "jock" on college campuses, so the lowering of standards for blacks and Hispanics reinforces the association -- in the minds of all parties concerned including the black and Hispanic students themselves -- of white and Asian with "smart" and black and Hispanic with "intellectually inferior." "Dumb black and Hispanic affirmative action students" is the inevitable association created, even if strictures of political correctness and concerns over hurt feelings discourage it from being expressed publicly. Systems of differential standards inevitably produce perverse effects of this kind. Within the context of the zero-sum nature of the reshuffling system, upward-ratcheting guarantees that Allport's "good contact" -- i.e. stereotype disconfirming contact -- will always be replaced by "bad contact" -- i.e. stereotype-confirming contact.
Professor Mullen discovers the third-oldest and one of the most competitive colleges in the country attracts a more affluent and more cosmopolitan student body with larger ambitions and wider career options than those of students attending the local neighborhood’s uncompetitive teacher’s college.
Certainly a lot of Yale students come from more affluent and better educated family backgrounds, but comparing Yale and Southern most meaningfully would have to be done on the basis of academic talent. Southern’s students have average SAT scores in the 480-490 range on the three parts of the current test. Yale quotes different 25%/75% figures, which indicate that only 25% of Yale students got under 700 on any of the three parts of the SAT, and another 25% got 780 to 800. Yale admits around 7.5% of applicants these days. Southern admits 71% of applicants.
While she was flying down the road 20 miles over the limit, a woman passed by an overpass only to find a cop with a radar gun on the other side lying in wait.
The cop pulled her over, walked up to the car, and with that classic patronizing smirk we all know and love, asked, "What's your hurry?" To which she replied, "I'm late for work." "Oh yeah," said the cop, "what do you do?" "I'm a rectum stretcher," she responded. The cop stammered, "A what? A rectum stretcher? And just what does a rectum stretcher do?" "Well," she said, "I start by inserting one finger, then work my way up to two fingers, then three, then four, then with my whole hand in. I work from side to side until I can get both hands in, and then I slowly but surely stretch, until it's about 6 feet wide." "And just what the hell do you do with a 6 foot asshole?" he asked. "You give him a radar gun and park him behind a bridge..."
Traffic Ticket $95.00 Court Costs. $45.00 The Look on Cop's Face. PRICELESS
One more: Things not to say to a police officer...
When he pulls you over and says,"I think I smell alcohol. Have you been drinking?" Do not say "I think I see powdered sugar on your face. Have you been eating jelly donuts?"
If it’s good, the government should subsidize it. If it’s bad, the government should ban it. If outcomes are in any way perceived by any group to be sub-optimal, then the government should regulate it. Anyone who opposes these bans, subsidies, and regulations must therefore be a supporter of bad outcomes, hate poor people, want people to get sick and die, etc.
All health care will be delivered by this method soon. Requests for chest X-rays will entail sending you an application to work at a Japanese power plant with a film shirt. Deafness will be treated by ordinances requiring that everyone yell at you -- not just the clerks at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Instead of glasses, those suffering from vision loss will be supplied with an even uglier spouse, because what difference will it make, anyway? At this point, with all our light fixtures filled with CFL bulbs, you can barely tell if you're living with a mammal, never mind a hottie. Good-looking spouses will be re-assigned to those with good eyesight, but who want Viagra, which doesn't grow on trees, you know.
Would you like to know more? Put in another quarter, and press pound. Your pound key generates all the electricity for your house, too, so press it a lot, really fast.
Read about the good old eastern US Red-Shouldered Hawk, the lover of wetlands and swamps, at Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Like the Barred Owl who keeps the little wetland critters on their toes at night, this bird likes the kinds of places I like. Wild, wooly, and wet.
Keep on Dancing: Haitian Salsa Champion Gets Second Chance to Dance due to Israeli Doctors – “We are extremely pleased to announce that George has been invited by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York to be featured in a float in the annual Celebrate Israel Parade [June 5].”
Barry Rubin (director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal):
Israel is not going to allow a president with no credibility, who clearly doesn’t understand what’s at stake, fails to support his Arab allies, is soft on his Iranian and Syrian enemies, doesn’t learn from his past errors, is sacrificing U.S. interests in the region, and pays no attention to what’s happening in Egypt, to determine its future.
Thomas Merton and Buddhism: “Merton, who helped to popularise "Eastern spirituality" in the West, really misconstrued and misrepresented Buddhism.”
Ryan turns the other cheek: ““A candidate who is timid on entitlement reform is not qualified to lead the country,”
Well written police report:
Orville Smith, a store manager for Best Buy in Augusta, Georgia, told police he observed a male customer, later identified as Tyrone Jackson of Augusta, on surveillance cameras putting a laptop computer under his jacket. When confronted, the man became irate, knocked down an employee, drew a knife and ran for the door.
Outside on the sidewalk were four Marines collecting toys for the "Toys for Tots" program. Smith said the Marines stopped the man, but he stabbed one of the Marines, Cpl. Phillip Duggan, in the back. The injury did not appear to be severe.
After Police and an ambulance arrived at the scene Cpl. Duggan was transported for treatment.
The subject was also transported to the local hospital with two broken arms, a broken ankle, a broken leg, several missing teeth, possible broken ribs, multiple contusions, assorted lacerations, a broken nose and a broken jaw...injuries he sustained when he slipped and fell off of the curb after stabbing the Marine.
Alternative medical treatments rarely work. But the placebo effect they induce sometimes does “Dr Ernst is no breathless promoter of snake oil. Instead, he and his research group have pioneered the rigorous study of everything from acupuncture and crystal healing to Reiki channelling and herbal remedies. Alternative medicine is big business. Since it is largely unregulated, reliable statistics are hard to come by.”
The decision is opposed by the Midwest Dairy Association, a trade group of 11,000 dairy farms. While applauding the focus on health, the association noted that chocolate milk sold in Minneapolis schools has less sugar than other versions and only 20 calories more than a carton of 1-percent-fat milk.
In addition, research funded by the dairy industry shows that bans on chocolate milk are counterproductive. Children who switch to white milk end up throwing more away and getting less calcium and Vitamin D, said Carolyn Hudson, a dietitian with Midwest Dairy. "If the kids don't drink it," she said, "they won't get it."
I regularly get calls for consultations from people seeking disability for emotional complaints. If I fill out the lengthy state form, it's pretty much guaranteed that they will get some sorts of government checks forever.
I tell them to call somebody else. I won't do it. In the charity clinic at which I volunteer my time we have a blind fellow, a guy with no legs, and a paranoid schizophrenic lady working. They all get the admin work done. At my supermarket, my bags are packed by a gal with Down's. She is a sweetie.
The calls I get about this are, like, I have bad Bipolar or bad OCD, or bad drug addiction, or chronic depression with fibromyalgia. Being a Psychiatrist, I fortunately do not get calls from the people who say they can't work because their back hurts. Whose doesn't?
Giving up on a productive life means giving up on life and giving up on dignity. A colleague of mine will not work with anybody on any form of disability. His view is "If they have given up hope for themselves, why should I bother?" I tell him it's all about getting the money, not about hope. Scamming the system, or reverting to dependency.
My seating companion at a very pleasant dinner last night engaged me in a conversation about the Moslems - the Moors - in Spain. My friends tend to be people with many interests and pursuits. Luckily for me, my aging brain remembered some of the history, but I wanted to quickly review it today. This was a good quick source: Muslim civilization in Spain (711-1492)
She knew all about it, and is taking a course in Ottoman art and design at Yale. We wondered what had happened to to Moslem civilization, and how and why it deteriorated to the point of its apparent current barbarianism. I speculated that perhaps it was not Islam, but the Ottoman Empire which had a civilization relatively independent of religion, as the Romans had, but I was just trying to maintain the level of the conversation.
Photo: One does not tend to associate the culture of the Alhambra with the current Middle-Eastern Islamicists who seem more focused on destruction than creation.
The president just finished speaking to a packed convention room at the AIPAC policy conference. He was not booed when he entered; most stood and offered brief applause. Still, the crowd during the speech had long periods of stony silence, and audible boos were heard when he brought up his plan to base an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal on the 1967 border lines. President Obama took nothing back from his foreign policy speech on Thursday and blamed the press for any controversy. He doubled down, making this upcoming presidential election a time for choosing for friends of Israel....This president once again has proved an apt negotiator on behalf of the Palestinians and a thorn in Israel’s side.
Conveniently, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat has now released a statement, transforming Obama’s border guidelines into preconditions for renewed talks. Until recently the Palestinians had no problem negotiating without those preconditions. It was widely recognized that the Palestinians were trying to get to Obama’s position—a final status agreement structured around the 1949 lines plus land swaps—but that they would have to negotiate to it and make concessions along the way. Now Erekat is insisting that “there is no point talking about a peace process” unless Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu accepts the final Palestinian position as everyone’s starting position. Since that’s not going to happen under any circumstances—nor should it—we are again in a situation where President Obama’s de-facto advocacy for the Palestinian cause has made peace more difficult to achieve.
Me:
Obama to Israel, "Let's agree to disagree, and you'll pay for it later, out of sight of this audience."
Netanyahu replies: "My audience will hear from me tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, and the next, despite your sellouts."
It's like a perfect distillation of every unpleasant mental, verbal and physical tic extant in the land, gleaned from all points on the cultural, racial, and class compass.
Children raised solely by the popular culture and the public schools are essentially feral, but somehow less noble than an actual feral person would be. That's a difficult thing to achieve. Must be why it costs so much property tax money and cable bill cash to accomplish.
As The Wall Street Journal explains, “For a 10-year policy that costs $135, he [Centre] and his band of atheists promise to come to their [true believers’] homes after the Rapture, collect their pets and care for them. He says his 259 clients tend to be devout believers over the age of 40 ‘who love their pets and are sincerely concerned for what will happen to them.’”
Mr. Centre carefully screens all job applicants, making sure they are both animal lovers and, perhaps more importantly, not Jesus lovers.
“These are people not likely to be Raptured under any circumstances,” Mr. Centre told The Washington Post.
Continued the paper: “After a background check, each rescuer must satisfy Centre by blaspheming in accordance with Mark 3:29, the part of the New Testament that reads: ‘But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.’”
PowerLine’s Scott Johnson, its music aficionado, reminds meof the most popular song among us Marines in Vietnam in the late ‘60s, “The Letter”. At the 1st MarDiv Hqs EM Club (a large shack), beer flowed (why always Black Label? A mystery, but who cared, it had alcohol), funding traveling shows of sexy girls doing cover songs, very well to our horny ears (horny ears? Yeah, Devil Dogs).
I guarantee you that we sang “The Letter” much better, louder (at the top of our lungs) and with more real feeling than this video of Joe Cocker with the All Stars of Mad Dogs & Englishmen. (The original by the Box Tops was recorded in 1967, and -- comments? -- better done.) We had more reason to sing and dance than the Hippies listening to Joe Cocker. And, even with much beer, we weren’t as spasticated.
DEAR CONGRESS: Your Credit Application Has Been Turned Down. “Our records indicate that your annual income for the 2011 taxable year was $2,170,000,000,000. You have requested a credit limit of $17,000,000,000,000. These figures exceed the American Public’s debt-to-income guidelines for credit issuance.” (HT: InstaPundit)
Meanwhile, consumerism and a crass popular culture, which increasingly constitute the common ground of being American, fill the void—and I’m not sure that a sustainable national identity can be built on a shared appreciation of fast food, bad movies, and vulgar popular music. Immigration can work again in this country. But for that to happen, schools and government must recommit themselves to teaching and reinforcing the common culture and political principles that immigrants once learned to become Americans.
The Problem with (Un)strategic Ambiguity -- And, Kissinger indicates US is getting ready to throw Taiwan under the bus. It’s getting crowded under there. President Obama’s revised Dale Carnegie: “How to lose friends and influence enemies to be determined”. “Mr. Kissinger suggests negotiations with the mainland "in which the de facto autonomy of Taiwan is preserved." On the model of Hong Kong? "Certainly beyond the Hong Kong pattern," he says.”
How Medicine Became a Growth Business: “The public is seeking care far beyond any need or reasoning. The influx of well, worried well, and worried sick people into a system designed to find medical diseases in sick people leads to large increases in false positives.”
I may have posted a photo of what my buddy's tumble-down get-away place in the wilds of upstate New York looked like when he bought it a few years ago. Saplings in the yard. Busted windows. This place had no door, clapboards with all the paint worn off or broken, and holes in the roof. Fallen chimney, I think.
The old farmhouse, in deer- and turkey-hunting territory, looked like a lost cause to me. A "scraper," as they are called around here. The guy is handy with guns, but I had no idea he was so handy with house renovation. Looking really good now. Not only a good new roof, but a power line too! Power is good.
I think I may volunteer my landscaping services in exchange for some turkey hunting. For starters, this place needs some apple trees.
They've been saying "The 60's are over" for years. And now, for Mr. Bob Dylan, they finally are.
Well, so are all dog breeds, until someone gives them a breed name. But Brittanys aren't really true Spaniels (here are the 
At HuffPo, 
My seating companion at a very pleasant dinner last night engaged me in a conversation about the Moslems - the Moors - in Spain. My friends tend to be people with many interests and pursuits. Luckily for me, my aging brain remembered some of the history, but I wanted to quickly review it today. This was a good quick source: 
