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.
4:1 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness,
4:2 where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished.
4:3 The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread."
4:4 Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone.'"
4:5 Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world.
4:6 And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please.
4:7 If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours."
4:8 Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'"
4:9 Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here,
4:10 for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,'
4:11 and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'"
4:12 Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'"
4:13 When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.
This is an annual re-post. We'll post more game recipes over the next few weeks to help our hunters with their bursting freezers -
With hunting season winding, it's time to get cooking what we have in the freezer. It all begins with the sauce:
Uncle Bill's Jus de Gibier (mixed game) sauce, aka Brown Game Stock, aka Clean out the Freezer Sauce
Technically, it's a jus, not a sauce. Add a little roux and it will become a sauce.
This will be the tastiest sauce base you have ever had in your life, for chicken, game birds, turkey, venison, pork, veal, pasta, ravioli, etc. It's an ideal base for pheasant, chicken, venison or goose bourguignon. It has an earthy richness to it which is remarkable. We like to make a woodcock ravioli with black truffle, and this sauce is essential for that.
Gibier refers to mixed game, but we do it with mixed meat too, but not beef, which would overpower the subtler flavors. It is the best use of freezer-burned game and other stuff in the freezer. It's fun to make (but it takes a while), and you can clean out the freezer and the fridge at the same time. I freeze the used carcasses of Thanksgiving turkey, ducks, goose, random deer bones, etc. to use when I make this, once or twice a year, along with freezer-burned chicken, pheasant, etc. You could do this with entirely store-bought stuff if you lack a hunter in the family. The more stuff, the better.
You need a 10-12 (or larger) quart pot to make this, if you have a lot of stuff to use, but it freezes fine when made. It's good for a few months, at least.
Bake in oven until browned (not necessarily cooked-though) your saved carcasses and freezer-burned game meat and meat, especially pork and pork bones are good, and veal bones, (even if they have already been cooked). Yes, you bake the bones too. Do not burn them in the oven. I tend to use freezer-burned venison, pork chops, all my game bird carcasses, venison bones (cracked with a mallet), a bunch of veal bones and veal scraps if I can get them nowadays (it doesn't hurt to hit up the butcher for some stuff for this), turkey carcass, woodcock carcasses, and a pile of chicken wings. Chop this stuff roughly with a cleaver into 3-6" chunks and toss in the pot. Try to crack the bones.
Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief? Shame and remorse and sobs and weary spite, and the vague terrors of the fearful night That crush the heart up like a crumpled leaf? Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?
Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate?
With hands clenched in the shade and tears of gall,
The 18-29 crowd say government should do more, more, more, and that’s the way they vote. These young people, who have been miseducated and conned by politicians, are in for quite a surprise. Not only are they unemployed in record numbers and can’t afford their student debts, there’s this: if the national debt fell solely on their shoulders (which much of it does), that would be another $300,000 they’d each be responsible for. A mortgage without a house to go with it. They’re going to be pretty angry if ever they wake up.
Via Shorpy. I doubt that the John Gilbert BED was a waterbed. Also, are we talking about The Order of the Garter, or, preferably, the dramatic and erotic Removal of the Garter?
In Mind and Cosmos, subtitled Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, Nagel revives the concept of teleology on the basis of his conviction that the mind-body problem has more serious ramifications for evolutionary science than is ordinarily accepted. How does the electrochemical activity of neurons in the human brain produce subjective, first-person experience? Nobody knows. Nagel says that the appearance of conscious beings such as us can be described as the universe waking up. Yet to him it seems unlikely that life would ever have got started in the first place, somehow springing forth from ‘dead matter’; still more unlikely that some forms of life would have developed consciousness; and extremely improbable that one form of life would have acquired the ‘transcendent’ power of reason. In order to explain these events, Nagel suggests, you need more than simply the ‘mechanistic’ tools of the laws of physics, natural selection, and so on. You need not just physical theory but ‘psychophysical theory’. And you might even need teleology.
It’s a bold claim, but not in itself an unscientific one. Indeed, what Nagel’s critics rarely conceded was the fact that teleological talk remains rampant to this day in popular and even academic science writing. Vast subterranean seams of purposive metaphor imply a picture of final cause not only in modern biology but in chemistry and physics, too. It has long been accepted that ordinary descriptions of biological function, such as ‘The heart is for pumping blood’, are teleologically inflected shorthand. But we also commonly read, for example, that subatomic particles ‘know’ or ‘choose’ the ‘right’ path to take; that molecules rearrange themselves ‘in order to’ achieve a certain energy state; or that traits in organisms evolve ‘in order to’ allow the animal to do something new.
Our metaphors are teleological, our language and understanding is metaphorical. Where does it all end?
6:1 "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. 6:2 "So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 6:3 But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 6:4 so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
6:5 "And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 6:6 But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
6:16 "And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 6:17 But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, 6:18 so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
6:19 "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; 6:20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 6:21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
A government limited to few things can probably do those things well, and thus it's likely to be trusted. A government that tries to do many things, might do them badly, and be less highly regarded.
“But President Obama? He believes it’s the cause of our problems, that the economic downturn happened because our government didn’t tax enough, spend enough and control enough. And, therefore, as you heard tonight, his solution to virtually every problem we face is for Washington to tax more, borrow more and spend more.”
Silent Cal is one of our very few presidential heroes. One quote:
What compelled Coolidge to persevere and enabled him to succeed? The
traditions of Vermont and its “hardy self-contained people,” as he
described them, always inspired him. Respect for the written law
animated him, but he also cherished the spiritual and what we call
natural law: “Men do not make laws. They do but discover them,” he told
Massachusetts state senators in 1914. His wife, Grace, one of the most
beautiful first ladies, gave him the confidence to move forward. A
ferocious discipline in work proved crucial as well. As documented in
White House appointment books, whereas other presidents met sporadically
with budget advisers, Coolidge met faithfully and weekly with his
Budget Bureau director, General Herbert Mayhew Lord. An intuitive
understanding of the struggles of small business aided Coolidge. Though
he was not, like Margaret Thatcher, born over a storefront, Coolidge was
born beside one. A keen sense of timing also helped him: Coolidge, a
shrewd politician, knew when to fight and when to wait. A thorough
understanding of the devices of government, and a willingness to use
them, proved key too. Also crucial was the Coolidge willingness to be
unpopular, which he displayed while still governor of Massachusetts,
when he stared down the striking Boston police, or when, as president,
he turned down his own people, farmers, by repeatedly vetoing subsidies
for them.
... the shock, in my mind, is not his commitment to compulsory redistribution, but that a leader so young has such old ideas. He is a man from America's past.
Barack Obama is old-school. He believes in top-down planning, not bottom-up incentives. He sees government as an industrial machine, though he lives in the age of the network. He trusts political and artificial imperatives from Washington, not natural and organic choices by ordinary Americans.His answer to irresponsive, ineffective, unaffordable old government is not reform, but to produce more of it. Obama's bright young smile cloaks archaic ideas, ill-suited for today's global economic race.
“I set out, usually, on a mission of self-discoveryto find out what I really think about a subject. I don’t have fixed opinions or views when I start to write; it’s writing that forces them out of me.”
Joseph Epstein, from a review of his latest book. I am an Epstein fan. Smart guy, says whatever he thinks and damn the torpedoes.
500,000 rail passengers move daily through that remarkable two-level space. That's a lot, but it will be more when the Long Island Railroad's new underground construction is complete (LIRR now only goes to Penn Station out in the West Side hinterlands). It was brilliant to put those tracks underground up to 96th St., thus creating upper Park Avenue and its now-insanely valuable real estate.
This ol' country boy still loves NYC. In my youth, I greeted so many gals and pals at that station, coming or going, that I feel nostalgia whenever I am there. Adventure. It looks and feels far better now, but that musty old train station smell is the same.
My pic of the Grand Central Market. Good stuff for prosperous commuters
to pick up on the way home. Excellent cheese and fish stalls.
A clip from 1941 movie Sun Valley Serenade featuring the full Glenn Miller band, the Modernaires (they're the card players and Paula Kelly), and wait'll you see Dorothy Dandridge cake-walk with the Nicholas Brothers (she was married to one of them). This gotta be one of the all-time Choo-Choos --maybe the wildest, funniest, ever! Also, Milton Berle is in the mis-en-scene audience --
3:12 Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness,
3:13 not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside.
3:14 But their minds were hardened. Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is still there, since only in Christ is it set aside.
3:15 Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds;
3:16 but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.
3:17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
3:18 And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
4:1 Therefore, since it is by God's mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart.
4:2 We have renounced the shameful things that one hides; we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God's word; but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God.
Uncle Bill's Jus de Gibier (mixed game) sauce, aka Brown Game Stock, aka Clean out the Freezer Sauce
You know you've been waiting for it: 
Reversibility
My Dad's eyesight is failing, but reading is his greatest pleasure. He refuses to watch TV. We got him 
The magical p
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Do things have purpose? Nagel's new book has provoked plenty of reaction. From 
This is Kate Upton wearing body paint, 
