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.
I am opposed to amnesty for illegal immigrants, partly because it is indeed a crime and we are a nation of law (why begin citizenship as a Federal criminal when there are legal ways to do it?), and partly because I have seen what five-ten year hoops and expenses legal immigrants to the US need to go through, such as physicians from Canada and the UK, and programming geniuses from Singapore. Also, because I believe that vast numbers of immigrants cannot be assimilated. (Case in point: Mexifornia. Case in point: Europistan. Case in point: Dearborn, MI.) And, lastly, people have no idea how impossible it is for an American to emigrate to Mexico. Many American citizens and retirees would like to, if they could. Puerto Vallarta. Cabo. Basically, they have made it illegal to do so. Mexico is hell on immigrants. They want none of them.
Toward the end of the 19th century — when the United States first began to impose meaningful restrictions on immigration — we carved out exemptions for our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, especially Mexico. Mexicans were effectively exempted from the 1885 prohibition on contract labor that marked the first major federal restriction on immigration. When head taxes and other entrance fees were imposed on immigrants in 1907, Mexicans were again given a pass. And when the United States first implemented a literacy test for immigrants (conducted in their native languages) in 1917, Mexicans were specifically exempted from this policy as well.
Most notably, when in the 1920s the U.S. assigned discriminatory, racially motivated quotas that varied among the most common countries of origin, no such limits were imposed on nations in the Western Hemisphere. This substantial carve-out reflected concessions to agricultural employers. But it was also a nod to business interests eager to keep markets open, as well as to the foreign-policy establishment, which worried about offending our neighbors.
It is worth reading. In the end, I suppose, my sentiment is that I would prefer that people who live in crappy countries do what they can to improve them. My blessed and brave ancestors did that here, for me. Half the world would invade the US were they able to do so. If you want to come here, why not try to make your place like ours? We have enough people already, and terrible unemployment with grandiose PhDs working as restaurant waiters. Nothing wrong with educated wait staff, but it's probably not what they envisioned in their Obama Economy.
Bear in mind that I very much enjoy the legal Mexican and Colombian immigrants around here. Great people, family people, ambitious and entrepreneurial, and wonderful restaurants too. They are doing many jobs which unemployed Americans, with their sense of entitlement, spurn. However, it is true that they frequently prefer cash which, as an honest taxpayer, I resent. Not entirely assimilated into American values, know nothing about our history or traditions or even why we are a special place. Willing to work hard, though. It's more about money than political freedom because neither Mexico nor Colombia are totalitarian or oppressive states.
Except for Boston, New England doesn't have the hispanic drug gangs and crims that California has. Most of our crims here are home-grown.
My Heart's In the Highlands (Live, 2000) Bob's lyrics here. (And here is Robert Burns' song of the same name.)
I see people in the park forgettin' their troubles and woes They're drinkin' and dancin', wearin' bright colored clothes All the young men, with the young women lookin' so good Well, I'd trade places with any of 'em in a minute, if I could.
Heck, Mrs. BD and I have skiied at 10 below. Definitely brisk and exhilarating. I recall that I had a big old Ford Bronco at the time, and it was not too eager to get running but it did after coughing a bit. The skiing was just fine (short lift lines) but the chair lift, in the wind, was brutal. That was Vermont.
4:14 Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country.
4:15 He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
4:16 When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read,
4:17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
4:18 "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,
4:19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
4:20 And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.
4:21 Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."
4:22 All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, "Is not this Joseph's son?"
4:23 He said to them, "Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, 'Doctor, cure yourself!' And you will say, 'Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.'"
4:24 And he said, "Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown.
4:25 But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land;
4:26 yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.
4:27 There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian."
4:28 When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.
4:29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.
4:30 But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
I have gotten deep into The Leopard, and I can report that I think (for what it's worth) that it is a masterpiece of modern literature. No, of literature. I've read a lot of books. I have not seen the movie with Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale, but I don't need to.
It is sensual in imagery, poetically-written. Guiseppe di Lampedusa finished it shortly before he died, but, sadly, could never get it published.
The story is set in Sicily in the 1860s, during the time when Garibaldi's forces were constructing the nation of Italy, including the invasion and annexation of Sicily. It's a vivid portrait of Sicily which, even today, seems Italian in name only.
Lampedusa warned readers to keep track of the Prince's dog, Bendico.
I'm doing the cooking today and not doing Mommys of America cheap 'n easy - I am making Julia Child's Boeuf Bourguignon for the kids. I browned the meat, carrots and pearl onions (doubled the amount of onions because I love them) and prepped the lardons last night. Also threw in some porcinis because I hate a meat stew without them, and a couple of dashes of ground clove. I do it the French way - large chunks of meat (2 1/2" or 3" x 3" - they shrink) and large chunks of carrot. It's meant to be about the stewed meat. I used a Chianti Classico because I had a glass last night and an open bottle, but should have used a Cab I think. Why not a Burgundy, as the name says? I don't know. I used a 3-pound chuck roast instead of venison, and cut it into large hunks. I don't know why I used the pearl onions because big old onions work just as well, or better.
Then it all goes into the big new crock pot for 7 or 8 hours, adding the pearl onions near the end. Since we old folks are going out to dinner tonight with friends, I hope the kids appreciate my efforts and will leave us some leftovers. I'll have egg noodles for it. They are the best thing for beef stews.
The only real hassle with Julia's recipe is having to drain the stew and reduce the sauce instead of just ladling it out of the pot. Worth the trouble, though.
But this is a post on lardons. Or was. While catching up on the subject of lardons, I noticed this country-style French bread: Fougasse de Foix. Baked into it is Gruyere cheese, creme fraiche, and lardons. How good does that sound?
Gun-rights supporters often say their right to keep and bear arms comes from the Second Amendment.
They're wrong. That right comes, as do all of our rights, from God.* The Founders and Framers presupposed and accepted as self-evident "unalienable rights, endowed by our Creator". None of the Amendments grant us any rights; what they do is forbid the government from infringing on them, as rulers have always done from the beginning of history.
In America, the government does not confer rights. The ideal of freedom, and self-reliance, preceded government. Many immigrants and descendents of more recent immigrants from lands with authoritarian histories don't understand that, nor do many African Americans whose ancestors were involuntary immigrants and even less free than indentured servants or serfs. My ancestors, however, did invent a government to ensure our freedom, and deliberately handcuffed government power for the same reason. Americans do not have delimited rights - the government has delimited powers. That was the radical idea which remains too radical for statists. Such was intended by our Constitution, anyway. Since then, government, intoxicated with its importance, has been at war with our radical Constitution.
The pattern continues: With our fever yet unbroken, we treat weakness and need as some kind of a commodity to be exchanged for products and services, and strength, capability and service to others as some kind of a blight to be tolerated only churlishly, or not tolerated at all. Strength and weakness, each one treated as the other, as the opposite of what it truly is.
Violence by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with the strictest gun laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is only the criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been disarmed, and so crime runs riot. Cities of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere, which leave the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed in the Constitution, typically are much safer. More legal guns equal less crime. What criminal would be foolish enough to rob a gun store? But the government alleges that the citizen does not need this or that gun, number of guns, or amount of ammunition.
It's always gratifying to see a formerly knee-jerk Lefty come around to rational sanity. None of us is required to think the way we thought twenty years ago. We are meant to learn as we go through life.
The concept of an elite guiding national development for the benefit of those it governs remains operative today among blue partisans, but what’s changed is that the blue elite no longer sees a bright future for the masses. It turns out that there are two ways to think about the trajectory of liberal society. The traditional view is that over time the differences between elites and non-elites can and should shrink, and it is the proper goal of liberal policy to ensure that they do.
The other view is to believe that differences of talent and ambition ensure that the world will always be divided between a creative minority and an inert majority, and that the goal of social policy isn’t to eliminate that ineradicable difference, but to ensure that the process of recruitment into the elite is genuinely fair. Once the privileges of race, gender and fortune have been neutralized so that the elite is a purely meritocratic body, the members of the elite are obliged to concern themselves for the welfare of the majority, but there is nothing more to be done about equalizing their condition with that of the elite. Authority must rest in the hands of the qualified; those who score poorly on aptitude tests, don’t do well in classes and/or lack extraordinary beauty, artistic talent or ambition must resign themselves to taking direction from the natural aristocracy that a well ordered society has brought so smoothly to the fore.
By 1880, New England had been almost completely deforested. Moose, Wolf, Black Bear, and Wild Turkey were gone or limited to tiny habitat islands. Deer were rare. Then profitable farming moved west to the rich plains of Ohio and Indiana. Good-bye to rocky New England.
With reforestation, Moose and Wild Turkey have rebounded, and Beaver, Bear, and White-Tailed Deer have become pests in some areas. So have the highly-adaptable coyotes, who moved into wolf territory (coyotes were never native to the Northeast) and are now considered pests in New England with generous hunting and trapping seasons for eastern coyotes, coydogs, and coy-wolves if any.
Those critters are all Wolf food, including coyotes. Maybe not the bears.
The new coyotes of the Northeast are larger than those of Western US and Canada, may have a few wolf genes, and a large male is easily mistaken for Wolf or German Shepherd.
There is only one species of Wolf in the world - Canis lupus. The species has - or had - a global reach, with all of its various subspecies (subspecies means races - of which the domesticated Dog is one. The Grey Wolf and the Eastern Wolf are probably the same subspecies, but there is much controversy about wolf subspecies genetics).
All domestic dogs in the world were genetically engineered from the Eurasian Grey Wolf subspecies, including African domestic dogs, beginning around 14,000 years ago. Wolves - dogs - were domesticated before any other animal but your average wild wolf cannot be civilized, even if raised from birth by man. Humans must have found the rare wolf individuals with civilizable genetic flaws as in photo below:
North America's Grey Wolf was an immigrant across the Bering Strait from Siberia and, along with the Cougar, were the dominant predators across the entire US and subarctic Canada.
Dominant predators require large ranges of undeveloped land, preferably without roads and cars. The Cougars will have a tough time repopulating the Northeast, but the Wolves can come down from Quebec. In dribs and drabs, they have been doing so. Probably lone wolves. Visual reports are not reliable, but DNA testing is so the animal has to be shot or trapped to be tested to distinguish the animal from a coydog, a coy-wolf, etc. I don't know why coyotes and wolves can interbreed if they are separate species.
There are no records of confirmed Wolf breeding or pack-forming yet in New England, but these occurences would not be surprising, and would be welcome to many. Wolves remain common enough in Canada to have popular hunting seasons for them. Wolves leave people alone, unlike foolish Cougars who sometimes confuse a jogger with a deer and eat them up.
Heather on women in combat: "I am not aware of any comparable crusade to create gender-integrated football teams. At least America knows what’s really important."
Prof. of Philosophy and Law (NYU) Thomas Nagel's classic short essay What Is It Like To Be a Bat? (1974) is a fairly deep reflection on mind and consciousness. Take an extra Adderal before studying it. One key quote:
At the present time the status of physicalism is similar to that which the hypothesis that matter is energy would have had if uttered by a pre-Socratic philosopher. We do not have the beginnings of a conception of how it might be true. In order to understand the hypothesis that a mental event is a physical event, we require more than an understanding of the word 'is'. The idea of how a mental and a physical term might refer to the same thing is lacking, and the usual analogies with theoretical identification in other fields fail to supply it. They fail because if we construe the reference of mental terms to physical events on the usual model, we either get a reappearance of separate subjective events as the effects through which mental reference to physical events is secured, or else we get a false account of how mental terms refer (for example, a causal behaviorist one).
He is certainly one of the most provocative and interesting philosophers around today.
In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel continues his attacks on reductionism. Though the book is brief its claims are big. Nagel insists that the mind-body problem “is not just a local problem” but “invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.” If what he calls “materialist naturalism” or just “materialism” can’t explain consciousness, then it can’t fully account for life since consciousness is a feature of life. And if it can’t explain life, then it can’t fully account for the chemical and physical universe since life is a feature of that universe. Subjective experience is not, to Nagel, some detail that materialist science can hand-wave away. It’s a deal breaker. Nagel believes that any future science that grapples seriously with the mind-body problem will be one that is radically reconceived.
Epistomology becomes a whirl, or a whirlpool. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." I'll put Nagel's new book on my 2013 reading list, which continously expands. Too many books, too little time.
"after the Sandy Hook murders I felt compelled to do something, even if it was only symbolic. So, last month, I joined the NRA, the nation’s most effective civil rights organization, for the first time."
"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the new wonderful good society which shall now be Rome’s, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious."
This feisty little prodigy is Sugar Chile Robinson, aka Frank Robinson. Quite a youthful career, but he quit music, went to college, and became a Psychologist and had a radio show.
America is being run by a Made in Indonesia leader whose performance is as bad as any of the Made in Indonesia, Pakistan or China crap you'll find in Wal-Mart. And it doesn't matter because he's a brand. The savvier younger and urban voters don't care what he's made of, they care how he makes them feel. They may lose their job the next day and their prospects for paying off their college loans may be missing, but if it makes them feel good at the point of polling, then that's what matters.
This sentimental series could keep going on, but this is enough for now. I hope Moms are still cooking these simple, filling things for their kids, because kids (and Dads) appreciate them and the homey, loving, and pedestrian nature of the food.
Man cannot live on take-out alone. Even if Mom has no talent in the kitchen, hot and home-made (even with the help of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup) means a lot, says a lot.
Here's Moussaka. Very quick and easy to make. I've had it with ground beef, lamb, venison, even African antelope. All plenty good enough.
That's what Maggie's Mom's Home Cookin' is all about - good enough, loving enough, and cheap enough for a hungry, growing family.
(I deliberately left out many good Mom items which take more time to prepare - like Lasagna - or cost more - like ribeye steaks. And a good roast chicken can be got at Costco for $3.99. I left out Stuffed Cabbage and Shrimp and Grits, but I'll add them to the summary post.)
That theoretical eruption of Mount Toba 74,000 years ago almost might have wiped us out. The Ice Ages sure put a damper on things too. Changes in climate determined much of mankind's history.
Barring another Mount Toba, and with the help of some much hoped-for global warming, humans might populate the entire globe with cozy bungalows.
But we'll have another Mount Toba, for certain, sometime.
I have gotten deep into 
reconstruction of an old wax cylinder recording, but Whitman fans will relish
We have posted in the (ancient) past about what Greek temples and sculpture looked like when they were built. Vividly-painted.
Hilarious climate science fail by the warmists at GRIST (and now CNN)
By 1880, New England had been almost completely deforested. Moose, Wolf, Black Bear, and Wild Turkey were gone or limited to tiny habitat islands. Deer were rare. Then profitable farming moved west to the rich plains of Ohio and Indiana. Good-bye to rocky New England.
About the 
Prof. of Philosophy and Law (NYU) Thomas Nagel's classic short essay 
. One graf from 
This sentimental series could keep going on, but this is enough for now. I hope Moms are still cooking these simple, filling things for their kids, because kids (and Dads) appreciate them and the homey, loving, and pedestrian nature of the food.
A hearty Coors Light toast to Assistant Village Idiot in