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.
We have had a decade or two of some experts preaching that fat and salt will kill you. Many of us docs have been debunking those old claims, to little avail.
I have never met a stupid adult person. I have met plenty of ignorant people and people lacking in the curse of curiosity, but that's different. Mostly, we meet people with limited areas of stupidity: lack of self-awareness, lack of information or understanding, islands of emotionalism or impulsivity, unexamined biases, self-affirming rationalizations, etc.
The Lobster Roll is right up there with Clambake as classic New England summer cuisine. Clambakes have to be made by you, on the beach in a hole in the sand just like the Indians used to, but every New England seafood joint has its own recipe for the simple Lobster Roll.
If you grew up in Yankeeland, along the coast, clam and fish chowders have been one of your staples. They are seafood cooked with milk or cream, and whatever else. Real simple comfort food, served with hunks of good bread or those cute little Oyster Crackers.
Everybody knows Clam Chowder, for which there are 54,612 different recipes (not including the revolting "Manhattan Clam Chowder" which is poisoned with tomato. A good Yankee Fish Chowder is very similar to clam chowder. One of the best ones I ever had was on Grand Manan Island, where the chunks were huge - quartered potatoes, big chunks of onion, and 4" square hunks of fresh Cod.
The key for chowder is the stock: fish heads and bones, a few lobster shells are good, low-simmered for a couple of hours with some chopped onion and celery, pepper, etc. You do need to use the salt pork. The actual fish (like clams in clam chowder), you only add at the last minute and cook briefly - just until it flakes. Haddock or Cod are the only fish you can use. Scrod is just small Cod. Some use Monkfish, but I disagree: Monkfish is not a tasty fish, and it has a poor, chewy texture. Bacala - salt cod - works fine for any cod dish if it is handled properly. I prefer fresh.
Bermuda Fish Chowder bears no relationship to the Yankee version. It is from England, has no milk, but is wonderful in its own way. I have never tried to cook it, but have enjoyed in on countless occasions on lovely Bermuda. FYI, Bermuda Fish Chower's history here, and recipe here.
Image: Atlantic Cod. Overfishing has been a major problem - the wonderful Atlantic Cod is in trouble, and has been for many years.
Handling money is almost, or more, complicated than handling love and sex. People want both so much that it often scrambles their brains and incites irrational or self-destructive behavior (see our morning links today).
Money is difficult to obtain, all too easy to get rid of. Romance and sex are easy to obtain, difficult to get rid of. Having some money put aside means security and power over a crazy world, and love and sex mean, well, whatever they mean to you.
I once lived beyond my means, and made all sorts of rationalizations for it (eg turning wants into needs, like shoes, luxurious impulses, and "therapeutic shopping"). I learned from that, and some discipline from a financial spouse helped. I was smart about love, but dumb about money even though, before I married, I worked for every penny.
"Self-esteem", "amoure propre", is a strange concept, self-respect is very hard-earned, and self-hatred, whether deserved or neurotic, is a big challenge.
Clam chowder is very good, but cod chowder is great. Here's how I begin:
Chop up a hunk of salt pork into 1/2" or 1" pieces. Bacon is a poor second choice. Plus some butter. Chop carrots or parsnips, onion, garlic, celery - easy on the celery, one or two stalks. Sautee in the pork and butter until soft. There's your mirepoix.
Toss that into a stewpot, then a pile of fish heads and/or bones (from lean fish - no salmon, trout, tuna, bluefish etc. Heads are the best - your fishmonger has 'em and will happily give them to you). Add black crushed peppercorns, a bay leaf, some parsley, and one clove. A sprig of thyme is good. Cover with water and a cup or two or three of drinkable white wine, and simmer, covered, for an hour or two, while consuming the rest of the wine.
Cool it, strain preferably through cheesecloth but I use a strainer, chill in fridge then remove any fat on the surface. Some people like to find some bacon or salt pork in their chowder, so you can salvage them from the strainer, or make new.
You can reduce it or use as it is (I always thicken chowder with corn starch), as the base for fish soup or fish chowder. Don't use it as a base for New England clam chowder, though, because the fumet will overpower the delicate clammy flavor.
I've been preaching this ad nauseam but everybody has his own food religion based on superstition, old wive's tales, antiquated misinformation, and various quackeries.
If ignorance floats your boat, then go for it and be happy with the placebo effects, but just do not pretend that it makes sense.
If your triglyceride numbers scare you or your doc, take some statins.
Eat all the carbs you want, too, unless you want or need to lose weight. If you wish to be more slim, trim, and muscular, quit the carbs and exercise hard. And, for God's sake, quit with the stupid organic stuff. It's just marketing. Marketing genius for sure, just like the people who sell water in bottles.
I don't know what practicing clinician has time to write guidelines for other docs, but guidelines are nothing but trouble. The best medical care is both art and science. Knowledge is always incomplete, patients are individuals with unique situations, and all docs have their own preferences and points of view. Guidelines end up being little more than fodder for tort lawyers and time-wasters.
Worst of all, young docs feel as if they have to follow them. Many things go wrong when practicing by the book. Medicine is an art and a science.
Confessionals like this one can sometimes help those people blessed with sunny dispositions to have some understanding of those unfortunates without such dispositions.
People tend to discuss psychopaths (aka sociopaths) as if there were a sharp division between them and normal people. It seems as if it were, when you just look at the extreme end of the spectrum but, as in most traits, there's a spectrum.
Educated people often make doctors’ worst patients: anti-vaxxers, cancer treatment rejecters, herbal remedy enthusiasts. Why do otherwise brilliant minds ignore science and reject modern medicine?
Read the article. I think people tend to be skeptical because "the science" is always in flux so many would rather go with their relatively-uninformed judgement than with the expert judgement of the day which may be obsolete next year. Remember the big scare about hormone replacement? Remember when they claimed that broccoli was good for you? Etc. People do know that physicians are smart and well-educated, but they like to make their own decisions for better or worse.
In recent history, sexual interests and inclinations outside of bourgeois Judeo-Christian monogamy have been labeled as immoral and "perversions" in the Western world, and in Western Psychiatry. Western Psychiatry has even categorized them in detail but some (such as homosexuality, which I find to be often a dubious categorization of people) have fallen out of favor due to political pressure.
Among the things which the Western world has relatively-recently and variously considered antisocial (lacking in normal conscience) or perverse (defined as outside local social norms) and/or illegal are polygamy, adultery, promiscuity, nymphomania, rape, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, miscengenation, internet pron, homosexuality, orgies and wife-swapping and related debaucheries, cross-dressing, childrens' pre-pubertal sexual interests, transgenderism, paraphilias and many fetishes like masochism, etc, prostitution, whoremongering, zoophilia, and so forth.
These are all culturally and/or religiously-determined categories of the wacky and disorderly, Bonobo-like vicissitudes of the human sex drive and of human psychology. Many humans successfully repress their inner Bonobo and happily adhere to their local cultural and moral codes, more or less. Many others lack a strong Bonobo streak, but it's not as if normal people never have wacky and aberrant fantasies and "curiosities".
As a Psychiatrist in the Western world, I can easily accept that many such things are statistically abnormal (ie at ends of bell curves), but high IQ is "abnormal" too.
I recently read this: 'Pedophilia is natural and normal for males'. Not "normal," I think, but certainly culturally-normative in parts of the Arab and Asian worlds. Some of our readers are quick to label perversions as "sick" if not just plain appalling or revolting. So is my natural inclination, but I think that inclination is culturally- and religiously- determined. Many human cultures view things otherwise.
Is there a Western socio-cultural trend to normalize previously-perverse and antisocial behaviors and to abnormalize conventional morality? I think so. In Psychoanalysis, we think of these things as embedded in problematic personality structures, but we could be wrong.
I am not claiming that I do not make moral or social judgements about behavior. All I claim is that it's complicated because living in a culture is part of being human, so "natural" loses meaning.
I will await discussion, but I may need to tie you up with duct tape and whip you. Here's your fun fetish joke du jour:
Four friends spent weeks planning a perfect desert camping and riding trip. Two days before the group is to leave Rob's wife puts her foot down and tells him he isn't going. Rob's friends are very upset that he can't go, but what can they do?
Two days later the three get to the camping site only to find Rob sitting there with a tent set up, firewood gathered, and supper cooking on the fire. "Dang man, how long you been here and how did you talk your wife into letting you go?"
"Well, I've been here since yesterday. Yesterday evening I was sitting in my chair when my wife came up behind me, put her hands over my eyes and said 'guess who'?" I pulled her hands off and she was wearing a brand new see- through nightie. She took my hand and took me to our bedroom. The room had two dozen candles and rose pedals all over. On the bed, she had handcuffs and ropes! She told me to tie and cuff her to the bed so I did. Then she said, 'Now, you can do whatever you want.' So here I am."
... most adolescents do not develop anxiety disorders, but acquire the skill to modulate their fear as their prefrontal cortex matures in young adulthood, at around age 25. But up to 20 percent of adolescents in the United States experience a diagnosable anxiety disorder, like generalized anxiety or panic attacks, probably resulting from a mix of genetic factors and environmental influences. The prevalence of anxiety disorders and risky behavior (both of which reflect this developmental disjunction in the brain) have been relatively steady, which suggests to me that the biological contribution is very significant.
I am not sure why Obamacare rules require coverage for sexual conveniences. Sex is not a disease and, indeed, it is a sign of health. I recall that major medical policies frequently do not even cover labor and delivery because pregnancy is not a disease either.
The Obamacare rules do not require coverage for cosmetic surgery, at least not yet. Somebody will lobby for "Sagging Jowl Syndrome," you can be certain, in the future. When government gets involved with medicine, medicine becomes politicized and "diseases", "disorders", and "dysfunctions" proliferate.
It is not black and white. This brief interview about gay and straight is accurate and reasonable, in my view: The invention of the heterosexual - The history of straightness is much shorter than you'd think. An expert explains its origins.
As I have said before, humans are a highly-sexualized animal with omnivorous and often confused and confusing appetites and impulses.
Dorothea Dix was the activist whose efforts led to the first generation of American mental asylums. At the age of 39, she happened to visit a local jail to do a Sunday school sermon for female inmates. She found that criminals, retarded people and the mentally ill all lived together in terrible, unheated conditions. When she asked why, she was told "the insane do not feel heat or cold" (Viney&Zorich, 1982).
IQ is always an interesting topic. Ashkenazi Jews and Asians have the highest average IQs, and IQ testing correlates well with the SAT tests.
How genetic is it, and how moveable is it? Those are always studied and always in dispute. I always enjoy the company of people with higher IQs than mine, just as I enjoy playing tennis with more talented players.
How important is life "success" and life happiness to IQ? Not very much, I think, unless one aspires to being a Physics or Math genius. IQ is just one factor in a human personality but it is one, like height, which is readily apparent.
We’re a bit slow in maintaining consistency, although I suppose we will eventually succeed in making everyone equal. That means treating someone with a serious mental illness as if her preferences are merely preferences. It means only allowing for a voluntary commitment, a non-secure transport, and a facility from which you are free to leave at any time. It is one thing to remove gender so that sexual delusion can find itself comfortable in a nondescript stall… but it seems quite another thing to remove sanity so that all the world can be an asylum. It seems terribly obvious to look at prisons and madhouses and recidivism, to observe that this system of ours is broken in the sense that it is imperfect in its attempt to create a utopia; almost as obvious as to look at the results of closing them all down, and observe that Eden is no closer, and the world is still broken. But like the Bolsheviks who rallied for change and destruction, rightly pointing to existing flaws, we stand staring at Chesterton’s fence; we see the cracks and want to remove it, wholly unable to articulate why it was placed there to begin with.
I have no answer. There are many people who can not be helped. The world is an asylum, and life is tragic.
Let's hope not. Actually the article is a critique of behavioral genetics, aka evolutionary psychology, as much as anything else.
Humans are a highly-sexualized sort of ape, with no estrus period as most mammals and even monkeys have (except for the "great apes" of which we are one). It's difficult if not impossible to determine what sexual behaviors are "natural" for humans because mental activity, fantasy, relationships, and culture are such major parts of being human. After all, rape, murder, theft, violence, pedophilia, etc. are all sort-of "natural" for humankind, and there are cultures in which monogamy is considered a mental illness or a form of infantile behavior. It's safe to say that the Western bourgeois ideal of lifelong monogamous marriage and the nuclear family is very far from "natural" despite being fairly effective for child-rearing and overall life stability in Western culture.
It also is safe to say that humans are the horniest of animals and, with our capacity for wild imagination and strange (by animal terms) sexual desires and fantasies, a rather insane species.
The Lobster Roll is right up there with Clambake as classic New England summer cuisine. Clambakes have to be made by you, on the beach in a hole in the sand just like the Indians used to, but every New England seafood joint has its own recipe for the simple Lobster Roll.
If you grew up in Yankeeland, along the coast, clam and fish chowders have been one of your staples. They are seafood cooked with milk or cream, and whatever else. Real simple comfort food, served with hunks of good bread or those cute little Oyster Crackers.
Handling money is almost, or more, complicated than handling love and sex. People want both so much that it often scrambles their brains and incites irrational or self-destructive behavior (see our morning links today).
Dr. Bliss' Blissful Fish Stock (Fumet)
In recent history, sexual interests and inclinations outside of bourgeois Judeo-Christian monogamy have been labeled as immoral and "perversions" in the Western world, and in Western Psychiatry. Western Psychiatry has even categorized them in detail but some (such as homosexuality, which I find to be often a dubious categorization of people) have fallen out of favor due to political pressure.
A few links:
When it comes to sex, will humans ever be