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 wise, it seems to me, become comfortable with the idea of their own death. Christians even more so, with the hope of eternal life of some sort, free of pain and worry.
While health, disease, and fear of death are big concerns of many people, apocalyptic fantasies of mass catastrophe have captured the imagination of humans since the beginning. Life can be humdrum, but imagining apocalypse is exciting.
6:51 "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."
6:52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"
6:53 So Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
6:54 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day;
6:55 for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.
6:56 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.
6:57 Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.
6:58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever."
We provide the food (it's called craft service) - we are not union - and they turn the place upside-down creating sets. Delightful, well-mannered and very attractive kids in their 20s up from the city, full of good cheer and inventiveness. Also, plenty of film, acting, and lighting experience.
What a world! Life, for better or worse, just cracks me up. There is always something interesting going on and, if there isn't, you can make it happen. Having some kids helps to keep life interesting and complicated.
I tell them they are all after fame and fortune. They are.
Have to tip-toe around and keep out of their way.
I'd rather be back in Cape Cod - or Montana. In mid-summer, Cape Cod suits me best. Inland is too darn hot and buggy in the summer. In the summer, one needs cool salt water, cherrystone clams, sand, and a Robert Parker novel or two.
Now you can get it by mail, close your eyes, and pretend you are in God's country.
(Woops. Sorry - once again, we violated our rule to never say anything good about Montana. I will correct it by saying Montana Sucks. Do not go there, and do not move there. Chardonnay-sippers beware: you would hate it. It is full of redskin injuns, rattlesnakes, crazy horses, aggressive pangolins, evil horney toads, and Grizzly Bears, and excessively-armed paranoid meth-intoxicated right-wing rednecks who are always spoiling for a fight.)
Cereal is no good either. Pure carbs, no nutrition. Nobody under 50 eats cereal anymore except cowboys.
Pic on top is with friends hiking up on Ear Mountain, near the Bob Marshall Wilderness. A big hike. Leave the horses with the wrangler at the base. Have water in your backpack. Mountain Goats are up there. They eat the rocks.
The honest reflections of the more thoughtful voices on the American left confirm that Romney and Ryan are, in effect, leading the country. First there was William Saletan of Slate, who wrote--without irony: "A wonderful thing has happened for this country. Paul Ryan will be the Republican nominee for vice president." He added that Republicans like Ryan were the perfect antidote to Democratic excesses: "Maybe, like me, you were raised in a liberal household. You don’t agree with conservative ideas on social or foreign policy. But this is why God made Republicans: to force a reality check when Democrats overpromise and overspend."
I know that we have a few Chinese readers. We would welcome more.
A reader in China asked me to post this shout-out. I believe that many in the Middle Kingdom might enjoy a refreshing dose of freedom-oriented Americana - if only to practice their reading!
We'd love to see Maggie's go viral in China, but it ain't gonna happen. Politicians would shut us down.
We would like it if our Chinese readers would forward our site around to their email list. I do not believe that we are censored by your government.
Not yet, at least, despite our dangerously-subversive attitudes towards state power.
“Under the plan, all Massachusetts doctors, hospitals and other providers must register with a new state bureaucracy as a condition of licensure—that is, permission to practice. They’ll be required to track and report their financial performance, price and cost trends, state-sanctioned quality measures, market share and other metrics.”
Were you thinking of setting out a shingle in Massachusetts as a GP/Cardiologist/Obstetrician/Gastroenterologist/etc.? Bet you’ll think twice about that.
The Journal appropriately invokes Jeremy Bentham’s totalitarian idea of the all-seeing pantopticon here:
* “Massachusetts takes 360-degree surveillance and converts it into a panopticon prison. An 11-member board known as the Health Policy Commission will use the data to set and enforce rules to ensure that total Massachusetts health spending, public and private, grows no more than projected gross state product through 2017, and 0.5 percentage points lower thereafter.”
Got that? Your doctor is actively discouraged from spending too much on you lest that extra test that might save your life add too much red ink to the bottom line.
RomneyCare is a disaster unfolding before our eyes. I’ll leave it to others to apportion the appropriate quantum of blame to its eponymous architect or sponsor or whatever role Mitt Romney played in the creation of misbegotten piece of legislation. We all make mistakes. The important thing is that Mitt Romney has recognized his mistake and has credibly outline a plan to make amends by repealing and replacing ObamaCare. Meanwhile, team Obama continue to tout the most unpopular piece of legislation since prohibition. And people wonder why I predict Romney/Ryan will win by a landslide.
John C. Goodman: Why the Doctor Can't See You - The demand for health care under ObamaCare will increase dramatically. The supply of physicians won't. Get ready for a two-tier system of medical care.
Doctor Pay and Social Priorities - Med-school grads make less than business-school grads, and take on far more risk. Is this model sustainable?
You don't need to open a restaurant. You can be a seafood farm entrepreneur.
Natural marshes no longer support the markets for Littleneck Clams and Atlantic Oysters - especially the delicious Wellfleets. These tasty mollusks have to be farmed, but it's not very hard work.
You buy the seed from a clam or oyster nursery, protect them from gulls and whelks, and harvest them at low tide in your pick-up truck as the orders come in. You plant them, nature grows them on plankton. Sometimes you have to rake mud off the oyster bins.
The small producer I chatted with out on the flats at low tide has around 1,000,000 clams growing right now, at various stages of development. These are 30 cents each, wholesale.
He has around 500,000 Wellfleet Oysters growing, at around 70 cents each, wholesale. That's a nice little inventory, but a bad hurricane or winter storm can obliterate your investment so it is best to save your profits for hard times. That is intelligent, no matter what you do for a living. I don't think you can buy insurance for clam beds or most other sorts of income.
In his spare time, he was a three-term First Selectman of Wellfleet "until he finished what he wanted to get done," as a local friend said. It's always wonderful to me to see how unskilled Americans without any higher ed can find good ways to make a living.
Cranky, laconic old Cape Codder. I said I was curious about how he did this, and he replied "I don't know. Been doing this for 50 years. I still don't know what I am doing" as he lit up a fresh Marlboro.
Those orange mats on the right are what they protect the baby clams with. Clams live in the mud. Each year, new seed clams to burrow in the mud under a new mat. Usually harvestable in 3 years.
The oysters grow in the wire bins. Those beehive cannisters collect oyster larvae, to reduce his costs of buying seed oysters.
Shellfish guys out on the flats with their trucks at low tide in Wellfleet Harbor. The most difficult barrier to entry in this line of work is obtaining rights to areas of mudflat. Waterfront landowners own the flats out to 200 yards.
In 2008, Candidate Obama said, “if you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters.” He said, “if you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.” And that, he told us, is how, “You make a big election about small things.”
That was Candidate Obama describing the strategy that is the now the heart of his campaign.
If the Obama labeling campaign is successful, voting for Romney will mean becoming socially unacceptable; it will be tantamount to embracing a Neanderthal sort of mindset that opposes Obama not on his disastrous economic policies but simply because of his race.
By constantly moving to the left, the left is exerting control of the political space, defining the Overton Window in terms of its own political leanings. Moderates become slow leftists and conservatives become slower leftists. The entire spectrum comes to be defined by the positions of the left. Everyone in the spectrum becomes a leftist of radical, moderate or conservative temperament.
Leftist Planet - Why do so many travel guides make excuses for dictators?
Almost completely cut off from the maw of McDonald's, Madonna and other global corporate-cultural influences, Cuba retains a refreshing preserved quality. It's a space and place that serves as a beacon for the future -- universal education, health care and housing are rights people the world over want, need and deserve.
We have a President in charge right now, who writes to me several times a week begging for three dollars.
But He cannot explain why He should win His re-election. He cannot form a list of bullet points, or even a single bullet point, to explain how that helps anyone but Him, and, I suppose, the people who directly benefit from His victory. He’s in charge of America but He cannot explain why He is good for America.
The truth is that no one can preserve Medicare as we know it. There isn’t a prayer that your father’s Medicare will be around in 10 years. There is a legitimate policy debate going on about the direction we will have to go with it.
There is just plain going to be less money to spend on senior health care than there would have been if we let the program continue on its present unsustainable track. Health care providers and patients are going to have less money.
"“INSERT NAME OF REPUBLICAN TO BE DEMONIZED HERE is the worst, vilest, sexist, homophobic, God-worshiping, Second Amendment-supporting, budget cutting, evilest human being I’ve ever known in my life.”
Obama was a silver-tongued orator in the campaign, but he lacked a silver bullet in the presidency. He was a darling on the stump, a dud in office. This is not a remarkable view. It is held in the White House itself.
Taking a little break from some heavy-duty, sweaty yard work to offer a kudo to the youngest pupette who has just completed an eight-week spell of 14-hour days since her return from Czecho, with the last two weeks 5 pm to 8 am in NYC - Harlem. Her second Indie film job, third major film job (she worked on The Avengers). A few other commercial film jobs too. Now wants to move to LA after graduation in the Spring. California is much cheaper than NYC.
I want my kids near, but they have to do what they have to do.
She got home from work in the city today at 10 am while we were at church. She is in bed right now. We admire hard work here and do not respect leisure too much - well, unless it is energetic. Which side of the camera does she like to be on? Either. Writing, camera, acting. All good. We will all hear from her one of these days. She is beautiful, tall, smart, deeply planful about life (as I have preached), and ambitious. Kids surprise you. Mystery seeds.
Later...Typical. She just woke up. 5 pm. Driving way down now to Brooklyn to film a live music performance of a friend's band for a late-nite ad and for Youtube. Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the cool kids hang out these days. (In my time, Williamburg was all Hasidic Jews. Not now. How does she know how to get to Williamburg? Beats me. I do know how to get to Peter Lugar's, Junior's, and the BAM, but who doesn't?) Just had time to feed her some fancy Mexican take-out. Lobster chimichangas or something. She liked it. You just can't keep up with the kids today... The youth today are go-getters, Ayn Rand readers who like Ron Paul, think Obama is a twit for losers.
Maybe she will have time to rest when she gets back to school. But I doubt it. They are very demanding there, just like real life.
One cool thing about life: You get to set the speed of your own treadmill. I admire those who set it high, feel kinda sad about those who set it low.
It's the best stone- and brick-cleaner, but it has to be handled carefully. I am cleaning a hearth with it.
When you buy it, buy goggles and gloves. It's actually a solution of hydrochoric acid - same thing your stomach is full of.
You can't let it near bleach - the combo produces chlorine gas which will kill you. So it is fun to use. You really do not want it on your skin either.
Kids know that weirdos are weirdos. Life is not fair. Never was, never will be. I feel sorry for the outlier kids. Painful, but builds character. My kids generally have been embracing of the outliers.
The Killing - The battle to define Mitt Romney is over—and Romney lost
Too genteel to punch back? Should call them out as liars and as degrading politics. "Your campaign is disgusting and beneath the dignity of American politics. Shame on you."
Why Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and Truman Capote All Failed to Write the Great American Novel
John 6:51-58
Among the many fine things in Montana is 
I know that we have a few Chinese readers. We would welcome more.
Althouse 
A day late: 
The Science of How Music Enchants the Brain, Animated