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.
Back at the barn after a long days' hunt today in the Hudson Valley with a pal and his business partner. Venison stew for lunch with a Bloody with extra horseradish, shot lots of birds over my pal's excellent Lab, saw three Bald Eagles (one of which, we suspect, stole a bird from our bird pile), smoked a cigar, had a few good beers and some very good conversation too. I shot quite well today, which I do not always do. I always find that an Irish Coffee or a Bloody helps my shooting.
Advent is hunting season too in this neck of the woods.
Thanks, pal, for hosting such a fine day. Les tres riche heures du Bird Dog, blessed as he is with good dear friends who like to do things. (On the other hand, he did chastise me, gently, a little for not monetising Maggie's Farm.)
The first keyboard I ever approached was an 1800s Mason & Hamlin single manual reed organ, technically a harmonium. The wind is generated by vacuum-generating bellows (hence "suction reed organ") pumped by the feet of the organist. From a technical standpoint, these are like upright accordions with an organ-like sound.
My Grandpa salvaged it when the local Congregational church bought a new organ. He kept it in his living room, and the elderly, old maid church organist would stop by, unannounced. to play the old thing until she died.
Today, old reed organs are thrown in the garbage, but I think it's a shame. They are of an era when these were all small congregations could afford. Some folks had them in their homes, too: "Parlor organs." You can find them cheap on eBay, but often people will be grateful if you will just take them away.
Did I mention that mice like to live in them? My parents finally threw the old thing in a dumpster because I failed to take it away myself in a reasonable period of time. My fault.
This fellow explains how to use the foot bellows to affect the playing of a reed organ:
The first tune I learned to play on it was the hymn Work For The Night Is Coming. It is not just a song of toil and death, but a song of toil in God's fields and pastures, and I still love it. Here's the only half-decent version I could find on YouTube (on piano, not reed organ - lyrics here):
The firste stock-father of gentleness, What man desireth gentle for to be, Must follow his trace, and all his wittes dress, Virtue to love, and vices for to flee; For unto virtue longeth dignity, And not the reverse, safely dare I deem, All wear he mitre, crown, or diademe.
This firste stock was full of righteousness, True of his word, sober, pious, and free, Clean of his ghost, and loved business, Against the vice of sloth, in honesty; And, but his heir love virtue as did he, He is not gentle, though he riche seem, All wear he mitre, crown, or diademe.
Vice may well be heir to old richess, But there may no man, as men may well see, Bequeath his heir his virtuous nobless; That is appropried to no degree, But to the first Father in majesty, Which makes his heire him that doth him queme, All wear he mitre, crown, or diademe.
Gentleness meant "gentility," "refinement," as in the terms "genteel," "gentleman," and "gentry." I think "queme" meant "please." Jeff Chaucer was a fascinating fellow, well-educated and well-travelled, a prosperous businessman of the Medieval merchant class (including a wine-import business in London). A writer on the side. We are fortunate that some of his work survived the years. Was he the Father of English literature? Sort-of, yes. I took the Chaucer course in college, and we read it all in the Olde English. Good fun. We read everything he wrote. Almost like learning a new language.
His problem is likeability and general unattractiveness. His appeal is his cojones. Does Mitt have any cojones? If he does, he had better pull down his trousers and show them to us now.
Unlike we libertarianish people, you people actually hold and have been holding significant political power in the US over the past 50 years. What have you done with this power? You’ve greased the corporatist machine every chance you’ve gotten. You’ve made things worse, not better. Our current problems are your fault. You need to stop.
The guy is a hopeless, spineless putz and an embarassment to Anglicans everywhere. I repeat: How many times did Christ say that he was not there for political purposes, despite the Jews' hoping that he would be a secular messiah?
Nobody really believed that Obamacare would do anything to improve our health-care system or, even more absurdly, "bend the cost curve." By vastly increasing the number of insured and therefore of demand for medical care, it could only drive up costs. Remarks like Nancy Pelosi’s about having to pass the bill in order to see what’s in it showed that they weren’t really interested in what was in it — and nor was the President, who left all that up to congressional Democrats. What they cared about was the establishment of the progressive principle that the government should be in charge of overseeing health care. The details would be worked out later as history pursued its inevitable course of increasing government control over people’s lives.
Leftists take the long view, the Gramscian approach. At one bite at a time, their growing Leviathan wants to consume all that it can of private life in America. It's never enough, and never will be.
That's the essential problem: there is no end-point.
Readers may not have heard much about Heritage Turkeys. There have been many breeds of farm turkeys over the years, but today the bland Broad-Breasted White breed is the mass market turkey.
Heritage Turkeys are genetically closer to their wild ancestors, have far more flavor, and run to smaller sizes. Their meat is redder than that of the Broad Breasted White. They are growing in popularity because they do not taste like cardboard. In fact, their flavor is similar to Wild Turkey.
It's like the difference between a supermarket tomato and a home-grown variety.
You can buy Heritage Turkeys online at Dean & DeLuca or D'Artagnan. Some Whole Foods have them, but I won't go to Whole Foods, due to a Whole Foods allergy.
Wow. I just found out that D'Artagnan even sells Free-Range Wild Turkeys. Man, that saves a lot of otherwise-wasted time sitting in the woods.
These birds cost a little more, but they are hardly the same animal as the supermarket Broad-Breasted White. They taste like a game bird.
"Capitalism" isn't a theory. It's just what people do when they are left alone to do what comes naturally - like sex. Rush was hilarious on the topic yesterday, pointing out to the Prez that capitalist enterprise made his suits, his million-dollar buses, his bulletproof limos, his Blackberry, his airplanes, his vacation houses, his Wall St campaign funds, etc etc.
So Europe’s 60 or 70 year history with socialism is about to end in violent upheavals and misery… and here’s this ignoramus saying that it’s capitalism which is the proven failure.
Free markets have booms and busts. Socialism only has chronic busts.
While my cousins received free cradle-to-grave government handouts, they paid a devastating price for their dependency. They lost themselves -- their self-esteem, pride, and dignity. They lost the joy of success after failure. They lost the pursuit of their dreams. They lost the experience of developing their God-given gifts and talents. For perceived security, my cousins willingly remained slaves on the Democrats' government plantation.
"If a mad scientist were to repair to his laboratory to design a machine that would make white liberals uncomfortable, that machine would be Thomas Sowell":
Now 81 years old, Sowell is known as a libertarian-leaning conservative, which he is, and he has a thriving sideline in debunking racial platitudes. But he is first an economist, which means he is first an observer and reporter of facts, and if those facts take him to uncomfortable places, so be it. No, the prevalence of black men in the NBA doesn’t mean that the NBA is racist, it means that reality is racist. Yes, Barack Obama and congressional Democrats really do practice the same kind of ethnic politics that resulted in the Rwandan genocide and the Sri Lankan civil war, even if they do not practice them to the same extent. Yes, affirmative action is naked racism. No, rent-control laws don’t control rent. No, gun-control laws don’t control guns. No, standardized exams are not culturally biased—but, yes, life is culturally biased.
Because he is black, his opinions about race are controversial. If he were white, they probably would be unpublishable
To see something special. To see something beyond yourself and your imaginings. To follow it wherever it leads. To always remain prepared for miracle. That is the inner music of the story of The Star. Like all stories that survive, it is the music of the heart and not of the head, and like the heart, it will endure.
The paradox is that the welfare state, designed to improve security and dampen social conflict, now looms as an engine for insecurity, conflict and disappointment. Facing the hard questions of finding a sustainable balance between individual protections and better economic growth, the Europeans have spent years dawdling. The parallel with our situation is all too obvious.
Politicians in New Zealand are wedded to the idea of the activist state, but despite huge spending increases life is not much better for most people. Over the last decade, government has provided more social services but at such great cost that we have to question whether the marginal improvements in social outcomes justify the cost, whether there are other ways to bring about the same results, and whether such spending is fiscally responsible in the long term.
70% of the Forbes elite are self-made billionaires. Those entrepreneurial successes include not just the names behind Facebook, Google, Apple and Starbucks but also EBay (Meg Whitman, Pierre Omidyar), Yahoo (Jerry Yang), Nike (Phil Knight), AOL (Steve Case), Amazon (Jeff Bezos), Subway sandwiches (Peter Buck, Fred DeLuca), "Star Wars" (George Lucas) and even Beanie Babies (Ty Warner). Does anyone doubt that these members of the reviled 1% have enriched the country in significant ways?
Even more to the point is that all of these club-400 elites were once just like "us."
China's Hard Landing - The state-led growth model is leading the country into trouble:
China is a poster child for the Austrian school of economics' theory of the business cycle. After undertaking the biggest stimulus program the world has ever seen in response to the global financial crisis, the country is drowning in unproductive investments financed with credit.
... in the same summary the IPCC says “Projected changes in climate extremes under different emissions scenarios generally do not strongly diverge in the coming two to three decades, but these signals are relatively small compared to natural climate variability over this time frame. Even the sign (higher or lower) of projected changes in some climate extremes over this time frame is uncertain.” They are saying that up to the year 2040 the climate changes from the emissions of carbon dioxide will be so small as to be virtually undetectable from natural climate variability. This also strongly implies that any effects from global warming on extreme weather now are so small, compared with natural variability, that they are undetectable. This IPCC statement also leads to the conclusion that any claims that global warming is causing noticeable extreme weather events today is false. However, after 2040 the effects of global warming will then overwhelm nature and extreme events will be increasing due to carbon dioxide emissions. It appears the IPCC is worried about the lack of recent warming and is pushing the climate calamity farther into the future. To the general public this must send a very confusing mixed message.
The great Charles Dickens would, I am sure, be amused that his casual novelette, A Christmas Carol, would be one of his most popular works. It's a story of a cranky sinner becoming a reborn Christian, and the best testimony ever along with being one of the best movies ever made.
From covetous, cheerless insanity to joy in life, the loving "life in abundance" that we are promised. Non-Christians and atheists mght be able to get a sense of what it is all about from this film, even though it is never overtly Christ-centered.
This is somewhat edited, but contains the gist of it:
The first keyboard I ever approached was an 1800s Mason & Hamlin single manual
A Ballad of Gentleness
Why Is Art 
Readers may not have heard much about Heritage Turkeys. There have been many breeds of farm turkeys over the years, but today the bland Broad-Breasted White breed is the mass market turkey.
Mead to college students: 
This Man Came Up With 
In this case, it is actually true. A friend of mine who is an afficionado of remote aircraft says the 
From Vanderleun,
How to Make Beer: Our Family Discovers