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.
Here. Lawyers will get rich on this for many years, and Americans can rest comfortably knowing that our internet is in good hands, same as in Russia and China.
Not long after it was announced that 2014 was the hottest year on record, evidence has come to light of massive tampering of temperature data to make it appear that the earth is warming.
Paul Homewood discovered the tampering when he examined NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies temperature recordings. You may read about his findings here and here. He began by looking at the recordings from rural stations in South America. What he found was staggering. The originally recorded data had been changed dramatically. Not just altered slightly but shifted dramatically.
The originally recorded data clearly showed a relatively steady cooling from 1950 to now. Actual temperature readings ranged from a drop of 1/2° Celsius to a full one degree. However the doctored data flipped the original graph almost completely around. The new graph, the published data, showed almost a full 2°C warming. It’s outrageous! And this is the data that “climate change” experts base their bogus assertions on. And because they’re “men of science” no one is allowed to question. Oh, and it’s not just on graph or one temperature station.
There can be no reasonable explanation for this. These “men of science” have been lying to us for decades, and this deception is finally, albeit overdue, coming to light. They are being shown for who they truly are – liars and cheats.
Excuse me, Mr. Kerry, but when the earth was formed it was not like today. Fact is, without amazing human ingenuity, little of earth would be inhabitable by humans today.
“I don’t think we should jump every time the freaks with the ACE bandages around their faces put out videos,” Ingraham told the Fox hosts on Tuesday, adding that the U.S. should not be reacting “emotionally” to threats from ISIS, Al-Shabab or other terrorist groups.
There are no real class divisions in America except one: the college-educated versus the non-college educated. It helps to think of this in terms borrowed from the world of a Jane Austen novel: graduating from college is what makes you a “gentleman.” (A degree from an Ivy League school makes you part of the aristocracy.) It qualifies you to marry the right people and hold the right kind of positions. It makes you respectable. And even if you don’t achieve much in the world of work and business, even if you’re still working as a barista ten years later, you still retain that special status. It’s a modern form of “genteel poverty,” which is considered superior to the regular kind of poverty.
If you don’t have a college degree, by contrast, you are looked down upon as a vulgar commoner who is presumptuously attempting to rise above his station. Which is pretty much what they’re saying about Scott Walker.
Mexico! More historic than Europe, and mostly safer than Finland. My in-laws are there now, and each winter. Us? Been there, done that.Mayan ruins, beaches, amazing seafood, delightful people.
Which
is the most improved vacation opportunity for American dollars? - See
more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/02/which-is-the-most-improved-vacation-opportunity.html#sthash.jupdWdSy.dpuf
Henryk Gorecki's Third Symphony, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (1976). Mainly Polish laments, but using medieval musical modes. Gorecki's music had been more modern (ie, atonal and unlistenable) before this. This recording is with the amazing Dawn Upshaw. For me, it took three or four listenings and I liked it better each time. Deeply moving piece, in my opinion.
Gorecki insisted that this 55-minute piece, in 3 movements, was not about the holocaust but simply about sorrow in general. However, many feel otherwise, anyway - including the person who put together this visual accompaniment which is, of course, disturbing, but also distracting from the music.
All of these puddings require something to be served on top. For Bread Pudding, I've seen Rum Sauce, Lemon Sauce, Vanilla Sauce, etc etc.
Or the old standby, English Custard Sauce. No need to make it yourself - you can buy Bird's at Amazon. Ol' Mr. Bird invented it because his wife had an egg allergy. A bird, allergic to eggs...
Snow falling, a silent and peaceful world, first Sunday of Lent. Email says church is cancelled. That never happens except with hurricanes, so I think it means they can't get the parking area plowed and de-iced.
Marie Harf and the State Dept. are right: the solution to Violent Extremism does belong in your Community ... as long as your Community is Barksdale AFB in Shreveport, LA ... Home of the USAF Global Strike Command.
I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red potatoes, took them home, boiled them in their jackets and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt. Then I walked through the dried fields on the edge of town. In middle June the light hung on in the dark furrows at my feet, and in the mountain oaks I overheard the birds were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers squawking back and forth, the finches still darting into the dusty light. The woman who sold me the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables at the road-side stand and urging me to taste even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way, she swore, from New Jersey. “Eat, eat,” she said, “Even if you don’t I’ll say you did.”
Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme, they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker, the glass of water, the absence of light gathering in the shadows of picture frames, they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves. My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965 before I went away, before he began to kill himself, and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious, it stays in the back of your throat like a truth you never uttered because the time was always wrong, it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken, made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt, in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.
... all our money is, in effect, pocket money, doled out by the
government-parent to the citizen-child. We are the wards, not the
masters, of the state.
Deputy State Department spokesman Marie Harf gives the catastrophic foreign policy of the Obama administration a lighter than air, Valley Girl kind of feel. She is a walking self-parody. As such, she presents a novel use of expressive form.
The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.
- Please, if you must walk, or walk your dogs, in the street in the nightime dark or the morning dark because the sidewalks are snowdrifts, wear something light-colored instead of black. Sheesh. I swerve over the icy roads to try to avoid hitting you.
- I love the wintry cold. Problem is dressing. You go from outside frigid to frigid-then-warm auto, then to cold again, then to heated building. There is no way to dress for the changes.
- Feeding birds. Either do it daily, or not at all. They become dependent on your food to survive, like people on welfare. If you miss a day, they will die unless neighbors are feeding them. If you don't feed them at all, they will figure it out on their own. Or go south.
I was wondering whether Gore is now working on a second documentary, “An even more inconvenient Truth – I was wrong”. But of course he is not doing this. Ideas that have become an ideology do not admit falsification. Global warming has become an ideology, mostly but not exclusively concentrated in the progressive portion of the political spectrum. Its three central propositions have become axiomatic among progressives: that significant global warming is in fact occurring (“the science is in”); that its consequences will be dire; and that its major cause is industrial pollution (especially by evil American capitalism—never mind the fog of pollution hanging over the cities of India and China). Deeply committed progressives are as eager to sign petitions to stop this or that “carbon footprint” as petitions to pull American troops out of Afghanistan or to boycott Israeli products. The only (rather ambiguous) concession to the notion that, just maybe, all the science is not in, has been a shift in language from “global warming” to “climate change”. Critics of the ideology are pelted with pejorative labels—political reactionaries, uneducated ignoramuses (comparable to creatonists or flat-earth theorists), or agents of the petroleum industry.
I am not a climate scientist. But I can claim to be a specialist in ideologues who claim to be privileged epistemologically and thus entitled to disdain anyone who dares to reject their alleged truth...
I was a tough-minded secularist with the kind of soul that looked at the pictures of life with a hard, unblinking eye. Oh, yeah? Show me.
Ditto, Gerard. That is good. Been there, done that too. The sterile life, arrogant life, the "it's about me" life. I am long done with that; got the good infection by finally just letting it happen, opening my cold heart, and letting it in to change me. Or at least to try to.
“I thought the Crown Heights riots were a pogrom because you’re going out trying to kill Jews,” Giuliani said. “Why is this man incapable of saying that? You’ve got to be able to criticize Islam for the parts of Islam that are wrong. You criticize Christianity for the part of Christianity that is wrong. I’m not sure how wrong the Crusades are. The Crusades were kind of an equal battle between two groups of barbarians. The Muslims and the crusading barbarians. What the hell? What’s wrong with this man that he can’t stand up and say there’s a part of Islam that’s sick?”
American ballet: 
Oliver Sacks,
Things Episcopalians say (1): “Not literally.” Seriously? 
It’s official:
A book of interest: 
My favorite winter puddings are Indian Pudding, Bread Pudding, and Plum Pudding (with hard sauce, please).
He 
Winter's Tale: 
It's chilly in olde Newe Englande. I like to say "invigorating." Five below zero F here, with blustery wind. Almost like a normal day in Minneapolis. 
Embarrassed to admit that, being Protestant, I missed Ash Wednesday but that is rare for me.
My Doctor Just Gave Me His Cell Phone Number …