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.
I have mostly exhausted my interest in posting about the complexities of the "mad or bad" topic but in this case, based on minimal evidence, I'd guess "bad."
Psychiatry has little influence over evil. That's for theology. Evil fantasies are things we (and everybody, pretty much) deal with routinely, but actions are another matter. The devil is stronger than we doctors are. Some evil is everywhere, from boardrooms to government to priests and pastors to teachers to cities to campuses. Please do not tell me that this kid had "PTSD," or an "anger management problem." Some people lack a moral compass almost entirely, but that moral compass spectrum spans from none to spotty to obsessionally scrupulous and fearful. We can deal with the latter relatively easily, but not the former.
The truth is that some people are "born to be hanged," and, at the least, removed from the gene pool. We too often piously imagine that happy and good are default settings for humans as if we could get everybody there with a rearranged psyche and a right environment (we term that "psycho-utopian"). It's an evil lie and an evil vision because it denies the existence of evil itself. My life, and history, have taught me that sin has great power. For all we know, violence, deceit, and destruction of good cheer are the default settings, and civilized behavior a special, difficult undertaking. That happens to be what Freud concluded, and he was smarter and a deeper thinker than I am. Not to mention many prophets, and Christ himself.
It is a positive comment on our level of Western civilization that we are surprised by gross acts of evil rather than taking them for granted. Quite remarkable in human history.
Good and evil remain the basics, as they always have done.
Addendum: I realize that my metaphors sounded as if I believed that evil is genetic. What I mean is that some people simply seem destined for trouble.
A commenter there noted "The peoples of European countries never voted for, and don't want, a "United States of Europe". They want individual sovereign States within a Free Trade Area, which IS what was voted for."
At a recent meeting with two dozen Chicago leaders, some Democrats, some Republicans, I asked a simple question, “Can anyone name a significant American achievement in world affairs over the past five years?”
The room was completely silent. Since the group had traveled widely, I posed a second question, “Have any of you visited countries where relations with America are better than five years ago?” Again, silence.
*The
Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World - See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/the-impossible-exile-stefan-zweig-at-the-end-of-the-world.html#sthash.6j5BmCEQ.dpuf
Pic above is the NYC central PO, the James Farley US Post Office. Once a beehive, now pretty empty inside the grand building. A temple to commerce, paper communication - and Christmas mail.
They are communal spaces where everybody goes - or used to. They employ many people who might not be easily employable elsewhere. They lose money, but so do schools, libraries, parks, highways, passenger rail, and the US Navy. Everything governments do loses money. Organizations and institutions exist, in part, to do things that are difficult or unprofitable to do otherwise.
Naturally, whenever large numbers people are involved, politics enters and, at that point, money mainly is about votes.
Why is the Post Office any different?
Well, perhaps it isn't any different. What seems different today is that many government civic "amenities" and "services" have competition from private operations who carry the risk, so taxpayers are less willing to throw their money away to governments who don't really worry about the money.
Parks are operated by operations like Coyote's, libraries have to compete with Kindles, government schools have to compete with charter schools, government rail has to compete with cars and air, and even the military hires tons of private contractors. Despite the massive increase in the size of government, there are more and more people willing to provide traditionally (meaning since the Progressive Era) government services more efficiently, more cheaply, and unburdening the hapless taxpayer of the risk of money-losing services.
Fragile little totalitarian bullies. Trigger Warning for Maggie's Farm: "Danger!!! Reading this site might cause you to lose your hatred of Libertarian/Conservatives after a while."
The extremist error was to draw the attention of the broader public in the first place. They can only win in undemocratic spaces, spaces where an elite minority can act without an effective majoritarian backlash. The radicals prefer to seize control of these spaces, to achieve influence on them, or to carve out fiefdoms within them. Failing that, a small but vocal minority can badger elites unused to dealing with bad press and public pressure. Indeed, all of the recent radical victories have been confined to elite, undemocratic spaces. The media? A salon for well-educated Northeasterners. Universities? Opaque bureaucracies flush with cash. Corporate boards in the tech industry? They’re corporate boards in the tech industry. And that’s the dark truth of Cultural Marxism: While it claims to stand for equality and against elite privilege, its method has always been to become the elite, not to destroy it.
Want to Know If Your Food Is Genetically Modified? Across the country, an aggressive grassroots movement is winning support with its demands for GMO labeling. If only it had science on its side.
I'll bet anybody $1000 that Miami will not be underwater in ten years. Any takers?
Here's the scare headline: Miami Will Likely Be Underwater Before Congress Acts on Climate Change. Oh no - I'm scared. Not Miami! Not the US Congress! Yikes. Only Congress can save us from drowning. Or do they mean in 4000 years, when they do not realize next ice age will have lowered the oceans once again so that you can walk from Britain to France as they used to do before our SUVs ruined everything? I am deeply, deeply, seriously concerned, and it keeps me up at night. If you are not "deeply concerned" about something, there must be something morally wrong with you.
We all must become deeply, seriously concerned about something. Otherwise, what's the point of our existence? How do we otherwise justify it, right? We are foolish animals, me included. OMG, I think I accidentally ate a non-organic, GMO tomato last night. I am doomed.
Meanwhile, backtracking climate gurus warn that you should not expect their models to be correct. Not to worry, I do not and will not worry about models of any sort. All of the genius market models have been wrong, and those guys are much smarter than climate scientists.
... Marx has never vanished from the academy. The stubborn refusal of applied Marxism to produce anything but mass murder merely led to efforts to reframe the philosophy. Through much of the 20th century, Marx was clearly the greatest economist of all time, but his ideas had never been properly put into practice. Then he might have dwindled as an economist but was indisputably an important historian. When that didn’t pan out, Gramscian “cultural Marxism” allowed overwhelmed graduate students to avoid economics and history altogether in order to focus on Batman. When all else failed (and with Marxism, it always fails), Marx lived on through the claim that while his ideas may have faded, he was still an important figure of literature — a particular howler to anybody familiar with his clotted, vituperative, headache-inducing prose.
I forget from whom I stole the above image about home economics. However, I would dispute the "Low Difficulty" label of vegetable gardening. It's plenty of work and you have to love doing it as a hobby, like growing flower gardens.No, of course it's not worth the effort if your time and effort have any value - except for the tomatoes.
Thanks to Roger De Hauteville, King of Sicily, who kept our morning links going over the past week and a half. Kings are busy people, and I am grateful to him for having given us the time and for sharing his talent for the rare, the odd, the enchanting, and the absurd.
Speaking of the absurd, I'm back to work on today's collection:
Cuba isn’t a developing country; it’s a once-developed country destroyed by its own government. Havana was a magnificent Western city once. It should be compared not with Baghdad, Kabul, Guatemala City, or Port-au-Prince but with formerly Communist Budapest, Prague, or Berlin. Havana’s history mirrors theirs, after all.
It's Sunday. Have a pleasant Sunday. But remember, Sunday is Monday's mother. She seems nice, but she's just as likely to smack you with a hairbrush as not. Happens almost every week.
But we were good boys. We didn't break the Sabbath often enough to signify--once a week perhaps. Anyway, we were good Presbyterian boys when the weather was doubtful; when it was fair, we did wander a little from the fold. --Twain
There are some fairly bright people abroad in the land that don't understand that if the velocity of money is zero, as far as inflation is concerned it doesn't exist.
Check out their blog. As with all such schemes, the only people who want to show themselves naked are the only people you don't want to see naked. And the books suck.
It would be unchristian of me to point out who the little darlings voted for twice, wouldn't it? Pardon me while I go find a pagan to laugh at them and tell them to stop sh*tting where they eat.
‘New evidence strongly suggests that the very different kinds of society seen in the various races and in the world’s great civilizations differ not just because of their received culture – in other words, in what is learned from birth – but also because of variations in the social behaviour of their members, carried down in their genes.’
Erm, I don't want to rain on your parade, but that's only earthshaking news to people who Occupy public parks.
Several waiters in white coats told the council they, too, didn't like Brunei's laws but they asked why workers should possibly suffer for the City Council's vote of condemnation.
"It strangles our livelihood," said Ann Romer, a server in the hotel's Polo Lounge, a renowned gathering spot for Hollywood stars and filmmakers. "It causes us to be unable to support our families, my children and my sick grandmother in Vietnam."
There's more than a hint of Two Minutes Hate when the media mob gets interested in any particular thing. The object of their vitriol is chosen at random, by persons who stand to lose nothing, at the expense of the usual innocent people. And by the way, when I have sketchy outlays from strip joints and casinos I need to put on my expense report, I prefer listing them under "Entertainment", not "My sick mother in Vietnam." It's good accounting practice.
H.M.’s operation took place on September 1,
1953. Scoville peeled back his patient’s scalp, then used a hand crank
and one-dollar drill saw from a local hardware store to remove a bottle
cap’s worth of bone from above each eye. As cerebrospinal fluid drained
away, the brain settled down in its cavity, giving Scoville more room to
work. With what looked like an elongated shoehorn, he nudged aside
H.M.’s frontal and temporal lobes and peered inside.
PHYSICIAN, n. One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well.
“You know,” he said to me, “it’s just wood.”It took me a moment to realize how liberating this statement was. To him, woodworking held no mystery at all - it was just a thing you did. If he wanted a garden bed, there’d be no question in his mind that he’d make it himself. Why spend more on something suboptimal when you can build exactly what you want?
I think I've heard this line of reasoning before. My toddlers experienced it the first time they went boom boom by themselves.
My son has decided which college to attend in August. Yesterday I received a survey from one of the colleges he turned down. It was a series of questions about his decision, who influenced the decision, and which factors guided him.
It ended with two questions which surprised me. The first was to what degree allowing freshmen to have a car on campus would have altered his decision. I responded "Definitely would have no impact." I see no reason for a car on campus and certainly not freshman year.
The second question was "To what degree did the university's commitment to environmental issues play a role?" I replied "None at all."
Seriously? I know a few wingnuts take this seriously, but frankly I can't understand this devotion to 'environmental issues' I keep seeing at the colleges I visited. It truly is a religion and it's astounding when you consider the improved state of our environment today as opposed to, say, 60 years ago.
I suppose in another 18 years we'll only send kids to schools powered by sun, wind and geothermal energy. The glass, paper and plastic will all be in separated trashcans, every five feet, which are emptied every 20 minutes. Or maybe we're there already.
I know when I want to learn, it must be in the most eco-friendly environment possible and I don't care about the academics, it's all about saving the earth.
I had no idea snails had a preference for handedness, since they have no hands. Apparently they do, however. There's lots of interesting stuff before the final paragraph, where they discuss the issue of dextral or sinistral snails.
I'm taking turns lifting my eyelids. One seems to force the other down, like a teeter totter would.
I dislike teeter totters. Playgrounds should be free of physics examinations. Weight, lever arms, torque... bah! Archimedes has ruined my life. Taken the whimsy right out of it.
What Ruth’s doctor had done was unusual, or maybe even inappropriate, they told me—delivering bad news, especially over the phone, before it needed to be conveyed. When I asked them when the right time was to tell someone that death is unavoidable, they most often told me that the moment occurs after several successive attempts at stopping the cancer have failed. Only then, when the patient is cornered by cancer, that’s the time.
I'm not your buddy, guy. If you need a friend, get a dog. A doctor is supposed to give you competent care and then leave you alone.
He was the profane rube who had a mystical obsession with grammatical
punctilio and syntactical clarity. He was the untutored knucklehead (“Is
Moby Dick the man or the whale?” he famously asked) who lived on
unfiltered cigarettes, poker chips, and Scotch and yet somehow managed
to hire James Thurber and E. B. White, Janet Flanner and Lillian Ross,
Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell.
Duh. Writers like money. Writers really don't like anything but money. In this country, the man who gives victory in battle is prized beyond every other man.
In the new Internet economy, pious leftist code jockeys found companies that do nothing but put people out of work, then use the money they make to support redistributionist leftist politicians. It's the circle of life.
For example, say there's limited food in the environment. In such a
context those persons that associate food with anger and turn aggression
into an attack response to get the food are more likely to survive. "If
the food does not make you angry or doesn't produce aggression in your
system, you may starve and lose the battle," Aarts says.
I see the scientific community has discovered the Taco Bell drive through lane. Keep up the good work, guys.
In my day, you whippersnapper, "walk up music" was salsa music I heard through the door, being played at 90 decibels by the guy in 7A when I walked up the stairs to my third floor apartment. Don't get me started on the trumpet player.
Let's have a good day, people. And be careful out there
I forget where that image came from 
See how much it costs to hire your favorite band…or your least favorite, for that matter
Due cappuccini, at a highway rest stop. Some cocoa powder dusting on top. Yes, cappuccino is a morning/breakfast drink.
An interesting website: 
What's your favorite - granite or gelato? Pic is my fresh mandarin orange granite in the nifty
Thanks to Roger De Hauteville, King of Sicily, who kept our morning links going over the past week and a half. Kings are busy people, and I am grateful to him for having given us the time and for sharing his talent for the rare, the odd, the enchanting, and the absurd. 
