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.
Unless you have served in the Navy or the Merchant Marine, it is worth doing a trans-Atlantic crossing. It is a vacation in itself, and all ships have excellent gyms these days. If lucky, you can get a day or so of heavy weather.
There is always something to do on a ship (lectures, music, dining, socializing), but watching the ocean and the ocean critters is the best part for me.
Not an expensive trip either. I recommend heading for Southampton (London's ship harbor), but Le Havre also. Below are two links for Atlantic crossings, but I would avoid Norwegian Cruise Lines. Another note: Don't get an inside cabin. Those are places to put your kids.
However shocking it may sound, Child of God is not only among McCarthy’s best novels, it is one of his most poetically concise and beautiful ones as well. I do not think it farfetched to imagine that McCarthy means to suggest the ability of art to conquer insanity and evil by raising them to a higher level, or power.
"Victoria Johnson's American Eden is the kind of history I love: deeply researched, evocative of its time, and fascinating at every turn. It follows the life of David Hosack, early American doctor, botanist, New Yorker, and bon vivant, whose life touched the famous on both sides of the Atlantic. Hosack was there when Alexander Hamilton took a bullet; Hosack greeted the Marquis de Lafayette on his triumphal return in 1824; Hosack founded North America's first botanic garden on the land where Rockefeller Center now stands in midtown Manhattan. Where others saw real estate and power, Hosack saw the landscape as a pharmocopeia able to bring medicine into the modern age."
― Eric W. Sanderson, author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City
You did not learn much about life and work in the movie made from Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm. Movies can indicate content, action, but cannnot explain it.
I am re-reading the book. Read it if you have not. It is not Moby Dick (no transcendent component and no poetry), but the comparison has to do with the amount of information (oceanography, meteorology, technology, sociological, and the fishing industry) that Junger packed into this story. Not to mention that he is a compelling writer. Snappy, compact prose.
The guy deserves however many millions he made from the book. Sad to say, Melville didn't make a penny from Moby Dick.
All the old liberal virtues — disinterested inquiry, due process, colorblind justice, advance according to merit, not some extraneous racial, ethnic, or sexual quota — all that has been rebranded as the invidious patent of reactionary and therefore impermissible vice. In sum, the educational establishment in its highest reaches is today a cesspool, contaminating the society it had been, at great expense, created to nurture.
Still, parents are willing to climb naked over broken bottles and impoverish themselves to send their children to this cauldron of iniquity. The light from those extinguished stars still, for a short while yet, beams down upon us, and people still utter the words “Harvard,” “Yale,” “Princeton” with something approaching awe.
2.Everything in moderation. (Yes, I know the joke about that one - everything in moderation including moderation.)
3. The third is more subtle, and seems to be variously translated. It's in the direction of "certainty is dangerous", or "surety leads to ruin," or "certainty is insanity." Seems like a warning about hubris.
Our new housekeeping ladies only seem to speak Russian. They work hard and quickly, strong too as if they grew up on farms. Their English seems limited to "Good morning" and "OK".
I do not care where they are from as long as they are legal. Large portions of Ukraine are Russian-speaking, but I just wondered whether they would say "Ukraini" because there seems to be antipathy towards Russians these days, and sympathy towards Ukrainians.
Anyway, who cares? Clean and orderly household is all I care about.
I tend to think the view that one of the ways that Judaism is distinguished from Christianity is the primacy of justice in the former, compared to the primacy of mercy in the latter. To the Christian, everyone is a sinner, and so the differences between me and the death row prisoner are ontologically trivial. (A view like this I think motivates someone like the Atlantic's Liz Bruenig, whom I credit as one of the few honest death penalty opponents, even as I disagree with her.) Judaism, by contrast, is fundamentally a religion of law
Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen argues that a true education in the liberal arts is first and foremost not about pointing fingers but learning how to overcome one’s own weaknesses, malice, and addictions, which is hard work. The humanities provide countless models of thought, feeling, and behavior to compare and contrast and use as points of reference. Said Newman, “If then a practical end must be assigned to a university course, I say it is that of training good members of society.” If Newman was right, the humanities are less like parsley and more like the main course.
American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic 