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.
The author of the NYT op-ed piece is Sarah Conly, an assistant professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College, the author of “Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism.”
I suppose my question to Prof. Conly would be to ask her how she might feel if I were in charge of the coercive paternalism. After all, I am sure I have more real life experience, a better understanding of human nature, more university degrees, and probably more expertise in various areas than she does.
The Liberal Fascists tend to assume that the paternalists would always see the world their way. What if the coercive paternalists were to view the world my way? Then what? Would the Sarah Conlys view it as perhaps oppressive?
I do not just object to the disparagement of the sense of "regular" people, or to the indifference to the freedom that is supposed to be the American heritage - I object to the incredible arrogance which verges on the insane.
Sarah, apply your coercive paternalism to your kids. That's where that instinct belongs. However, I would not be surprised if you send them to a Montessori school.
As we head into Spring with snow still on the ground and snow predicted for tomorrow, here's what I'm seeing here in Yankeeland:
Carolina Wren Cardinal Tufted Titmouse Chicadees Mourning Dove Red Wing Blackbird Cowbirds Purple Grackle Song Sparrow Downy Woodpecker White Throated Sparrow still some Juncos Robins in flocks, mostly males lots of Golden Crowned Kinglets Blue Jay Sharp Shinned Hawks Mockingbird House Finches Goldfinch White-Breasted Nuthatch Canada Geese on the move, overhead
As my brother and I were beginning to clean out the parents' garage, at my Dad's request, yesterday, we found 8 wren and Bluebird houses. I'll put a few up here at the HQ, and the rest at the farm on my next trip up. We have a large Bluebird contingent up there but they have to compete with the Tree Swallows for the nest boxes. Birds compete for housing, just like people.
I’m a lean dog, a keen dog, a wild dog, and lone; I’m a rough dog, a tough dog, hunting on my own; I’m a bad dog, a mad dog, teasing silly sheep; I love to sit and bay the moon, to keep fat souls from sleep.
I’ll never be a lap dog, licking dirty feet, A sleek dog, a meek dog, cringing for my meat, Not for me the fireside, the well-filled plate, But shut door, and sharp stone, and cuff and kick, and hate.
Not for me the other dogs, running by my side, Some have run a short while, but none of them would bide. O mine is still the lone trail, the hard trail, the best, Wide wind, and wild stars, and hunger of the quest!
Made another Ribollita for Dad tonight (photo). Will deliver tomorrow - these things are always much tastier a day later. My ol' Yankee Dad loves Italian peasant comfort food.
I used a different recipe this time for the Ribollita. These greens are half Kale and half chopped cabbage, plus the whites of two leeks. I pureed about 1/3 of the Canellini beans, and had to use plenty of chicken stock to keep it from being too thick. Water would be purist but I like flavor, and I throw all chicken bones in the freezer for whenever I need to make chicken stock. Or I make it and freeze it.
There's over 1/2 cup of olive oil in there, and pretty much all the rest of the (frozen) Thyme I could find in the icy garden. Plenty of garlic, onion, celery, carrot, of course. Large can of crushed tomatoes - maybe a little too much.
Cheap and delicious, and fun to make. It is difficult to over-use thyme in soups and stews. That's where the "savoury" comes from.
Serve on top of small 1"-cube chunks of preferably-stale Italian or French bread in a soup bowl. A glass of Chianti Classico Riserva. Then take a nap.
Over the transom, with info from the Mayo Clinic cardiologists -
How many folks do you know who say they don't want to drink anything before going to bed because they'll have to get up during the night!!
Heart Attack and Water
Something else I didn't know ... I asked my Doctor why do people need to urinate so much at night time. Answer from my Cardiac Doctor - Gravity holds water in the lower part of your body when you are upright (legs swell). When you lie down and the lower body (legs and etc) seeks level with the kidneys, it is then that the kidneys remove the water because it is easier. This then ties in with the last statement!
I knew you need your minimum water to help flush the toxins out of your body, but this was news to me. Correct time to drink water... Very Important. From A Cardiac Specialist!
Drinking water at a certain time maximizes its effectiveness on the body: 2 glasses of water after waking up - helps activate internal organs.
1 glass of water 30 minutes before a meal - helps digestion 1 glass of water before taking a bath - helps lower blood pressure 1 glass of water before going to bed - avoids stroke or heart attack
I can also add to this... My Physician told me that water at bed time will also help prevent night time leg cramps. Your leg muscles are seeking hydration when they cramp and wake you up with a Charlie Horse.
Subject: Mayo clinic aspirin
Dr. Virend Somers, is a Cardiologist from the Mayo Clinic, who is lead author of the report in the July 29, 2008 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Most heart attacks occur in the day, generally between 6 A.M. and noon. Having one during the night, when the heart should be most at rest, means that something unusual happened. Somers and his colleagues have been working for a decade to show that sleep apnea is to blame .
1. If you take an aspirin or a baby aspirin once a day, take it at night. The reason: Aspirin has a 24-hour "half-life"; therefore, if most heart attacks happen in the wee hours of the morning, the Aspirin would be strongest in your system.
2. FYI, Aspirin lasts a really long time in your medicine chest for years, (when it gets old, it smells like vinegar).
Something that we can do to help ourselves - nice to know. Bayer is making crystal aspirin to dissolve instantly on the tongue. They work much faster than the tablets.
Why keep Aspirin by your bedside? It's about Heart Attacks -
There are other symptoms of a heart attack, besides the pain on the left arm. One must also be aware of an intense pain on the chin, as well as nausea and lots of sweating; however, these symptoms may also occur less frequently.
Note: There may be NO pain in the chest during a heart attack.
The majority of people (about 60%) who had a heart attack during their sleep did not wake up. However, if it occurs, the chest pain may wake you up from your deep sleep.
If that happens, immediately dissolve two aspirins in your mouth and swallow them with a bit of water.
Afterwards: - Call 911. - Phone a neighbor or a family member who lives very close by. - Say "heart attack!" - Say that you have taken 2 Aspirins. - Take a seat on a chair or sofa near the front door, and wait for their arrival and ...DO NOT LIE DOWN!
Tried it a few times with my Mom as a lad. Scary and exhilarating. We had a local hunt club. We had a member die on a hunt (overhead branch). Broken bones galore, of course.It sucks to fall off a galloping horse.
Think Ethanol is Environmentally Friendly? Think Again.
When I hear free-spending national leaders call for more infrastructure investment, I think of Detroit’s absurd People Mover monorail gliding above empty streets. That’s unfair, I know. Yet the city’s epic tragedy, which entered a new stage last week when Mayor Dave Bing lost financial control, provides broader perspective on the potential consequences of mixing economic distress with bad policy making.
The lady advice columnist suggests she might need therapy for wanting to wait for sex a few weeks with a new date. I'm sure the fellows would heartily agree...
It's the time of year for trip planning. A bit early to think about fall hunting, but spring and summer plans are on the menu.
For no reason that I can comprehend, Mrs. BD likes to go places with just me. I enjoy including the kids and giving them special life treats as did my parents for me, and their companionship and getting to know them better as they unfold is a joy.
She has gotten a little carried away, and now has things in the pipeline for 2014 too, God willing.
She has scheduled Little St. Simon's Island in April to catch migration season (to please me), a kid's graduation mini-trip, and the annual family reunion week in Wellfleet in August (for the first time, sadly without Mom but, I hope, with all of the immediate and extended family).
For fall, I dunno.
Before I get old, my short-term (3-yr) bucket list includes:
- a good-sized villa (5-8 bedrooms) in Tuscany for 2 weeks with enough room for the entire family and dearest friends, with a cook and housekeeper (they all come with that anyway) and rental cars for all. I am saving up for that, but it's not really too expensive. As much as I love Umbria and enjoy Sicily, the family all deserve more time in Tuscany. Well, my kids are lucky. They've been everywhere.
- More Sicily. Rent a sports car, drink a little Tenuta delle Terre Nere Etna Rosso, then drive all over with my cowboy hat and a history text and ignore the speed laws like everybody else. Try to frighten the Mrs. with speed, but that is difficult to do. She likes speed too.
- a barge trip through southern France with the inlaws and family. Dad's a bit too feeble for this now, but he already took plenty of these with my Mom.
- I need to get back to Pine Butte in Montana soon, maybe next Spring for wildflower bloom and Grizzly Bears,
- and to Big Sky in the winter before my joints begin to creak. I need new skis.
- Bermuda again, for a romantic 5 days (we like Cambridge Beaches - they call it luxurious but it is only luxurious by British standards)
- Another Holland-America Line cross-Atlantic trip, as we used to do when I was young. I love the North Atlantic stormy days on a ship.
- Another Holland-America Line history cruise
What's on the top of Mrs. BD's bucket list? A week down the coast of Turkey on a gulet. I would love to get back to Turkey again.
Carpe diem, friends, because memories are all we have of lasting value, and memories rarely include our daily routines and chores. Even if they should, so much of it just blends together.
Obedience to arbitrary authority is counter to everything that America stands for. We didn’t reluctantly cede a tiny bit of our personal sovereignty to the government so a bunch of know-it-all twerps could tell us what to eat, what to smoke, what to do and how to live. We did it to allow them the ability to keep order, which they have manifestly failed to do, and to perform a few basic governmental functions, which they have likewise failed to do.
So, a government that has failed to adequately perform the few discrete tasks which it should be performing now wishes to do a bunch of other things which it has no business doing in the first place, and which it will inevitably do badly and thereby cause even more problems than existed in the first place.
A reader sends us a pic of an immature Herring Gull in New England, with a big barnacle-covered Blue Mussel. He'll fly up with it 20 or 30 feet and drop it on rocks or asphalt until it cracks open.
Thomas Nagel may be the most famous philosopher in the United States—a bit like being the best power forward in the Lullaby League, but still. His paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” was recognized as a classic when it was published in 1974. Today it is a staple of undergraduate philosophy classes. His books range with a light touch over ethics and politics and the philosophy of mind. His papers are admired not only for their philosophical provocations but also for their rare (among modern philosophers) simplicity and stylistic clarity, bordering sometimes on literary grace. ..
another quote from the piece:
Materialism, then, is fine as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go as far as materialists want it to. It is a premise of science, not a finding. Scientists do their work by assuming that every phenomenon can be reduced to a material, mechanistic cause and by excluding any possibility of nonmaterial explanations. And the materialist assumption works really, really well—in detecting and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation. Materialism has allowed us to predict and control what happens in nature with astonishing success. The jaw-dropping edifice of modern science, from space probes to nanosurgery, is the result.
But the success has gone to the materialists’ heads. From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can’t quantify something, it doesn’t exist, and so the subjective, unquantifiable, immaterial “manifest image” of our mental life is proved to be an illusion.
That could keep you entertained for a while. (Some just audio - it starts with Delia. Second in the line-up is Blind Willy McTell. Good, solid stuff. A treat. The pieces run in series)
Let Them Eat Fat - Listening to the doctors on cable TV, you might
think that it's better to cook up a batch of meth than to cook with
butter. But eating basic, earthy, fatty foods isn't just a supreme
experience of the senses—it can actually be good for you.
Fear of fat has become a national sickness, an all-American eating
disorder: Call it fatnorexia. Where is Uncle Toby from Shakespeare's
"Twelfth Night" lamenting that, under the oncoming reign of Puritan
strictures, "there shall be no cakes and ale"?
I agree with Buddy about this tune. Let's do one more Irish post. You do not need to know Gaelic to understand the song. That's how it works with good songs.
Desmond Tutu: 
Carolina Wren
Made another Ribollita for Dad tonight (photo). Will deliver tomorrow - these things are always much tastier a day later. My ol' Yankee Dad loves Italian peasant comfort food.
It's the time of year for trip planning. A bit early to think about fall hunting, but spring and summer plans are on the menu.
Cow manure is 
Our friend at the