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.
It's White Truffle season right now (Oct-early December) in Italy. Black Italian truffles are often jarred, but the fresh Italian White Truffle is "the diamond of the kitchen" and is only obtained fresh.
At $300/oz., they ain't cheap, but you shave them into paper-thin flakes with a truffle-shaver so just one truffle goes a long way in making ordinary things into something miraculous. One is good for many meals. That incredible funky, earthy fragrance is the thing. The rule is that you never cook truffle: only add it after the cooking. D'Artagnan has them now, until they run out.
My very best truffle experience was Woodock Ravioli in jus gibier, with shaved black truffle on top. Perhaps my best taste experience in my life. My chef pal and occasional hunting buddy made it for us, with Woodcock he had shot. (Non-American readers may not know that wild game cannot be sold commercially in the US. You have to fetch it yourself.)
Some friends treated us to dinner last Weds. night at their favorite Italian restaurant because they were having a special White Truffle Night there. We chose the Carpaccio with Truffle, the Truffle Risotto, and a wood-grilled Tuscan Steak on a bed of Truffled Potato. That's Italian! Not many places I know where you can get a real Tuscan steak. It's not bland like an American or Argentinian corn-fed steak, and it's grilled with Italian Bay.
They even had a White Truffle Gelato, but we passed on that.
I commented that, if I were eaten by a tiger on my way to the car, he would be pleased because I was White Truffle-infused.
Most of the time, when we want a truffle flavor, I just use truffle oil. It comes in either White or Black, and it is wonderful stuff. D'artagnan sells that, too. As with fresh truffle, you add truffle oil after cooking.
I'm going to make up a nice big venison stew to go along with the turkeys this year. I have a few nice shoulders and loins shrink-wrapped in the freezer. Something sort of like this. I will make a venison bone stock for it instead of a veal stock but I will make it with the magical Porcinis.
Best to make a stew a day or two ahead. Better that way.
Do my friends shoot does around here? Darn right they do. Bow-hunting, usually. It's about the meat. Trophies are silly. Where ya gonna put them? We hang the deer for a week or two in the garage, and butcher them ourselves. In parts of New England, White Tails are almost pests. Many areas, no limits on does.
Contemplating oyster stuffing for the oven turkey this year. Seems like a bit of a waste of good oysters, though. I noticed that the Brits sometimes put Parmesan in their bird stuffings. Hmmm. I dunno. Best bird stuffing I have ever eaten had chunks of foie gras in it. Great. I have done cornbread/chestnut/sausage/apple stuffing too long, and got tired of it. Plus it's a pain in the neck to make, chopping all that stuff like a prep cook.
Why Lefties hold bureaucrats, technocrats, and dictators in such high esteem remains a mystery to me. I think it might be a substitute for faith in God - and in onseself.
More people shop at Macy's in NYC every day than are involved in OWS, but those normal Macy's shoppers don't get on the news. Silent majority, I guess, getting on with life without any hystrionic public bitching.
Windmills are a joke. Solar is mostly a joke unless you live in some place like Nevada. For fuel and power, we love nuclear, coal, oil, and gas. And wood!
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice! Let your gentle spirit be known to all men. The Lord is near.
Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.
A preview performance of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard at Classic Stage. Is Cherry Orchard the first modernist play? Some say it is. Plenty of ellipses, and disjointed communication. A comedy, sort-of, or a slice of life. Chekhov was a physician, a writer on the side.
Superb early dinner at the Blue Water Grill on Union Square. Mrs. BD had the Crab and Sweet Potato Hash. I had the Baked Cod with Lobster Mashed Potatoes. I didn;t pay attention to what our friends had. We had a jolly afternoon and evening in NYC. Blue Water is a Maggie's 4-star joint, especially for seafood. Perfect ambience, service, and food. I prefer the balcony, but there's more people-watching on the main floor. Their pic below:
I didn't want to use flash:
Took the subway, of course. Quicker and cheaper. The NYC subway system is a good IQ test, and a small d democratic form of transportation in the best sense. I have always enjoyed the subways. The whole thing was developed by separate private companies to meet market demaind, not by government planners. Works great, once you get the hang of it. The government took it all over, but I don't know why. Governments always have reasons to take things over, and it's usually all about money or votes.
14th St was hopping. Gotta love the vitality of a thriving, bustling city full of young, hard-working, ambitious, determined, and attractive people. That's the Empire State bldg lit up in the distance:
The planners like their project and speak well of it; that is enough to get a lengthy, heavy breathing puff job (hardened newspaper people would use a phrase in place of that one that is unsuitable in a family friendly blog like Via Meadia) in the New York Times. Only an idiot or a propagandist would write such a piece; it is hard to see how any editor would put it in print.
Just down the road from where the Pilgrims first landed in Provincetown. A house in town, downtown Wellfleet. I'd happily live, and raise some American bambinos, in this one had there been any work there - which there is not. As you can discern from my pics, Wellfleet ain't Nantucket. It's always a little raggedy, which is what I like.
As states send more and more mediocre students to college, students learn less and less. “Our colleges and universities are full to the brim with students who do not really belong there, who are unprepared for college and uninterested in breaking a mental sweat.” “Nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges don’t make academics a priority,” according to a widely-publicized January report from experts like New York University Professor Richard Arum.
"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."
In Scientific American, The Wipeout Gene - A new breed of genetically modified mosquitoes carries a gene that cripples its own offspring. They could crush native mosquito populations and block the spread of disease. And they are already in the air—though that's been a secret.
Good, bad, or indifferent? It's a little creepy to me, like Ice-9.
Has individual liberty been a prime value in American politics and policy since Coolidge? (We are defining liberty as freedom from the power and interference of the state.)
Do Americans talk liberty, but desire utilitariansm? Is real freedom too difficult or scarey for most people nowadays?
Secondly, three guys including Will Wilkinson discuss Libertarianism and Liberty in serious depth at Boston Review. At Maggie's, we believe that the "liberty cost" has to be a large factor in any policy equation, or else we aren't America anymore.
Today, you hear more about financial cost, health cost, and environmental cost, than about liberty cost. (Can I trademark the term "liberty cost," or has somebody else done that already?)
Seems to me that Repubs talk more liberty than the Dems, who have eliminated it from their political calculus since Woodrow Wilson. However, the Repubs talk it better than they act it. Have pols simply learned that, when it comes to voting, people want stuff more from the feds than they want freedom?
Thus you see, he is a Composition of Whim, Affectation, Wickedness, Vanity, and Inquietude, with a very small, if any Ingredient of Madness. … The ruling Qualities abovementioned, together with Ingratitude, Ferocity, and Lying, I need not mention, Eloquence and Invention, form the whole of the Composition
The rising cost of medical care comes from advanced, expensive technology (almost all created in the US), advanced expensive pharmacology, costs of malpractice insurance and absurdly excess expenditures to avoid lawsuits, and medical insurance and government insurance-subsidies for all medical care. Given all of the above things not changing anytime soon, the only way to control costs is bureaucratic rationing - which will entail the politicizing of any medical care which is covered by insurance. And that is a very bad idea, too. I see a future for medical care outside the entire insurance nexus.
Had I been a young, junior kid on the staff, I'm sure I would have done what McQueary did. Chain of authority. Had I been in Paterno's shoes, probably what he did: chain of authority. Arguably ethically wrong, but natural. (Update: I may not be well-informed about what was witnessed.)
A beautifully-restored turn-of-the-century summer "cottage" on the CT shore. These sorts of places originally had no central heat as they were indeed summer get-aways for prosperous New Yorkers, but they had plenty of coal fireplaces to take the chill off on cool summer or fall nights.
Third floor, as in most larger, pre-income tax era houses, was servants' quarters.
Very nice carriage barn too, with room upstairs for your chauffeur or gardener. In those days, there were tons of secure jobs for semi-skilled servants.
Theodore Dalrymple put it characteristically well in the City Journal a few years ago when he said that, had she survived to our own time, Woolf would have had the satisfaction of observing that her cast of mind - shallow, dishonest, resentful, envious, snobbish, self-absorbed, trivial, philistine, and ultimately brutal - had triumphed among the elites of the Western world. And if that seems a little harsh on someone who did I think have a considerable gift - Mrs Dalloway is surely a very good novel - just remember that she also wrote the most immitigably stupid book of the twentieth century.
It just goes to show that you should look at how people comport themselves towards the world before accepting that they have something worthwhile to say about turning away from it. But the good news is that, when you do look, what you see is not always a disappointment.
You can turn away from the world without a chip on your shoulder, perhaps without even really thinking that that’s what you’re doing. But of course it isn’t as easy as that. Most of us will turn away from the world because it displeases us, and displeasure with the world is usually going to be our own fault. By comparison, turning away from the world in the full bloom of its loveliness is a gift, and no one will grasp it who has not already begun to receive it.
and
But I think I went too far in worrying that even the best philosophical or literary talk about death was always going to be on the edge of vacuity. By comparison, I’d say nowadays that a well-adjusted sense of absurdity and meaninglessness is much more likely to be good practice for the truth of its expression. After all, death does define existence. And the refusal to face up to it - no, that’s wrong, almost everyone “faces up to it”; the real point is to let the thought of it mature over the years - is as good an explanation as any for our tendency to insist on defining ourselves in terms of contingent things, things that are vulnerable to change.
The examples are endless. A violinist can get her fingers crushed. A footballer can lose a leg. A devoted husband can discover that his wife is betraying him. Children grow up and leave home. We don’t always get the top job. All of these things can induce despair. But, according to Kierkegaard, the real despair is about something else. It is about the thought that one is nothing if not a violinist, an athlete, a man loved by his wife, a mother whose children still need her, someone moving successfully up the career ladder, and so on.
Mrs. BD's pic on the High Line Sunday evening. It's pleasant for a stroll, but surprising to me how much of an attraction it has become. No public funds.
Long-term mortgages may or may not be a good idea, but they do have willing sellers and buyers. In most of the world, mortgages are either rare or very short-term, ie 5 years, and are not tax-advantaged. From Forbes:
A 2005 paper by Adam Gordon describes the effects of federal mortgage policy from the 1930s until the 1960s. Congress created the Federal Housing Administration in 1934, and gave it the power to provide mortgage insurance to housing lenders. At the time, state and federal regulations strictly limited the kinds of mortgages banks could issue, which meant that mortgages were short—often as little as 5 to 7 years—and came with down-payments of between a third and half the value of a home. In the 1930s, the FHA convinced all 48 states to relax these rules for FHA-backed loans, arguing (correctly) that such loans were not as risky since they had the backing of the federal government. But most states did not liberalize the rules for banks with private mortgage insurance. In practice, this meant that FHA-backed loans were the only 30-year, low-down-payment loans on the market, giving the FHA de facto power to decide who would be eligible for such loans.
and
The FHA’s standards became a self-fulfilling prophesy. Young, upwardly mobile families in the market for a first home (at least the white ones) went where they could get the best deal, and thanks to federal guarantees that was the suburbs. Meanwhile, urban areas were starved of capital thanks to state laws that banned private parties from making long-term loans in those areas. Not surprisingly, suburban home construction boomed during this period, while urban areas stagnated.
The FHA and the mortgage interest tax deduction introduced giant distortions into housing markets. Just add "free" government highways to the mix, and you get what you have.
In my view, the FHA and the mortgage deduction are simply subsidies to construction industries and unions, and the freeways simply indirect subsidies to the auto and trucking industries and suburban construction industries.
Nationwide, an estimated 250,000 students are enrolled in full-time virtual schools, up 40% in the last three years, according to Evergreen Education Group, a consulting firm that works with online schools. More than two million pupils take at least one class online, according to the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a trade group.
Transnationals are not so much anti-democratic as post-democratic. They believe that in the 21st century, democracy should be updated to include the enforcement of "universal principles of human rights" that they, of course, will enumerate and define. They talk not of surrendering sovereignty but of "sharing" it "collectively." The result, they assert, will be a new age of "global authority" that will produce "global justice" under a "global rule of law."
Indeed, since the end of the Cold War, transnational progressives have been establishing international laws — really supranational laws — that no voters can repeal or even amend. One way this is accomplished is to draft a treaty and apply international pressure to get the U.S. president's signature and the U.S. Senate's ratification. Judges — often from undemocratic countries — in transnational courts then interpret the treaty to mean whatever they want it to mean. There are no courts of appeal.
And if the U.S. rejects the treaty or agrees to only parts of it by issuing "reservations," the transnationals declare that the U.S. is bound nonetheless — under what they call "customary international law" to which, they further insist, even the U.S. Constitution is "subordinate."
Depleted Texas lakes 
It's White Truffle season right now (Oct-early December) in Italy. Black Italian truffles are often jarred, but the fresh Italian White Truffle is "the diamond of the kitchen" and is only obtained fresh.
I'm going to make up a nice big venison stew to go along with the turkeys this year. I have a few nice shoulders and loins shrink-wrapped in the freezer. Something sort of
Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms
Politely 
That good old toon is via 
A 2005 paper