Wednesday, May 31. 2006
Welcome, visitors from all over the world! Please visit us often - or bookmark us. Check us out, while you are here. We are always interesting, often provocative, and always eclectic and suprising.  For us head-shrinkers, public figures make for great case examples, because there is no confidentiality issue. The downside, of course, is that we don't really know them in any depth. All we have are public words and behavior.
Al Gore offered us a nice example last week when he stated, about his admittedly propagandizing and fear-mongering movie Inconvenient Truths: "...I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis."
So it is appropriate to lie? Should we re-name it Convenient Lies? Although this is not the first time Big Al has made similar statements about his choices (the "no controlling legal authority" case), I will not throw stones, because I do not claim to be perfect. Instead, I'll just take a minute to look at the meaning of his statement. I take it as a given that all humans are prone to immoral thoughts and to wrong-doing, or temptations for wrong-doing: there would be no need for laws, rules, or morals if that were not so. And it is known that, while a small fraction of the population lacks any meaningfully-functioning conscience, most people have consciences of varying degrees of strength and effectiveness. Whenever we "size up" a new person, that is always an essential item on the list. The conscience functions by sending up warnings to us when we are heading into behavior we feel might be morally questionable; by punishing us with guilt or shame or remorse when we cross our moral lines; by rewarding us with the wonderful feeling of self-respect when we follow our moral expectations; and by holding up for us an ideal of who and what our best self could be. Living with one's conscience is one of the great challenges of being an adult: we struggle with it, and sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. There are a number of tricks we can play on our conscience, though, in an effort to make it leave us alone and give us a free pass. Our case example of the day highlights one of the most effective tricks: Rationalizing. What Gore said - and I believe that he believes what he said - is that it is OK for him to deceive the public by distorting and cherry-picking and exaggerating facts, because it's for a good cause and because he means well. (No doubt he rationalized illegal fund-raising with a similar justification. Hey - everything can be a "crisis", right?) Translated, this says: "If my intentions are good, or if I have a good excuse, then the ends justify the means and my inconvenient morality can take a vacation." (When you think about it, though, morals are always "inconvenient." Always. The Ten Commandments were a great gift to our better selves, from a God who well knew our weaknesses and flaws, and who longs for the best for us and from us, but who offers us the respect to make our own choices.) That form of thinking is enormously corrupt and corrupting, because it can justify anything - lies, theft, mass murder, adultery, injustice, mayhem, exploitation, cruelty, disloyalty - you name it. To use this trick, all you need to do is to convince yourself that you are aggrieved, or that "everybody does it," or that you are such a superb person that you are on the side of the angels - and you get a free pass from your conscience. No wonder it's such a popular self-deception for those with, shall we say, "flexible" consciences, aka serious moral flaws. If you can believe that the angels are on your side, or that you are a victim, or that you are better than other people - anything goes (especially if you can burnish it with a gloss of phony idealism or victim entitlement). How damnably convenient! Matthew 16: "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" Image: I like the image of Jiminy Cricket as the representative of our conscience. We all need him, perched on our shoulder and whispering into our ear, at all times. If you want to enjoy yourself in the short-term - ignore him. He is a party-pooper but, in the end, he is on your side. Editor's note: For an honest and rational discussion of the greenhouse effect, try Junk Science. And click on our blog headline to read more posts this week responding to this piece, and to the commenters on this piece.
Tuesday, May 30. 2006
This great lady, now dying, is profiled here in The New Yorker. H/T, Hewitt
Thursday, May 25. 2006
 She told me we couldn't afford beer anymore and I'd have to quit. Then I learned she had spent $175.00 on make-up. And I asked how come I had to give up stuff and she didn't. She said she needed the make-up to look pretty for me. I told her that was what the beer was for.
"You know something is happening 
here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" I have always thought of the capacity for irony as a good, rule-of-thumb IQ test. Language without an occasional twist of irony is like language without metaphor. However, if you don't get the definition of the word correctly, you can't use the concept. The word is only properly used to refer to something addressed to a dual audience, or "as if" to a dual audience: one in the know, and one not. The usage has been contaminated by the illiterate, and is now sometimes used to apply to the "incongruous" or "unexpected", as in "Ironically, we both showed up at the wedding in the same dress." The cutest way to say that would be "Funnily enough,..." One amusing use of irony is to say stupid things, or ungrammatical things, with the assumption that those in the know will figure that you are using irony, while others will figure that you are plain uneducated or ignorant. Start with "nucular." Anyway, world - let's get the usage down properly: there is no excuse for abuse of English, since it has now become our "national language." Ed: Image of Dr. Bliss added to this post, entirely without irony.
Wednesday, May 24. 2006
Bob is 65! But ageless and timeless.  Once upon a time you dressed so fine; didn't you? (video, with Lennon - neither sober in the least)
I dreamed I saw St. Augustine,
Alive as you or me,
Tearing through these quarters
In the utmost misery,
With a blanket underneath his arm
And a coat of solid gold,
Searching for the very souls
Whom already have been sold.
"Arise, arise," he cried so loud,
In a voice without restraint,
"Come out, ye gifted kings and queens
And hear my sad complaint.
No martyr is among ye now
Whom you can call your own,
So go on your way accordingly
But know you're not alone."
I dreamed I saw St. Augustine,
Alive with fiery breath,
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death.
Oh, I awoke in anger,
So alone and terrified,
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried. ("I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" words and music by Bob Dylan 1968 Dwarf Music)
 From a fine piece in The New York Sun:
By the early 1950s, Mr. Domino had perfected the basic beat of New Orleans rock 'n' roll: repetitious 16th notes in an insistent triplet pattern.Virtually everything he played, fast or slow, conformed to that motif, which made ballads and rockers alike irresistibly danceable. It was the big beat. Mr. Domino's best music was harmonically simple too. "My Girl Josephine," for example, essentially consists of three chords (B flat, D sharp, and F) over and over in the I-IV-V pattern of the blues.
Read the whole thing.
Tuesday, May 23. 2006
Glenn Reynolds takes a look 
at why people in
industrialized countries have fewer babies. He asserts that, in addition to the cost in money and time, parenthood no longer has the social value that it once had. He does not mention two medical factors: the Pill and the drop in infant mortality. A quote: There's also the decline in parental prestige over generations. My mother reports that when she was a newlywed (she was married in 1959) you weren't seen as fully a member of the adult world until you had kids. Nowadays to have kids means something closer to an expulsion from the adult world. People in the suburbs buy SUVs instead of minivans not because they need the four-wheel-drive capabilities, but because the SUVs lack the minivan's close association with low-prestige activities like parenting, and instead provide the aura of high-prestige activities like whitewater kayaking. Why should kayaking be more prestigious than parenting? Because parenting isn't prestigious in our society. If it were, childless people would drive minivans just to partake of the aura.
The piece is here.
Monday, May 22. 2006
After reading Novak's commments, I decided not to go but, like Bird Dog, I let the family go by themselves while I worked in the vegetable garden. The gave it a 7 or 8 as a thriller, and said the religious aspect was functionally trivial and not worth getting excited about. Shrinkwrapped has a review. This blog will write no further on this silly subject: movies are entertainment. We have bigger fish to fry...or do we?
Saturday, May 20. 2006
Try it. Bressingham Gardens. All of our places should look like this, but Maggie's Farm sure does not: 
Friday, May 19. 2006
Hey, people! It's just the entertainment biz. Big bucks, and just for fun. From a Bainbridge piece at TCS: Jesus Christ as Poache  d Egg. A quote: ...the International Herald Tribune reports, Brown has managed to convince many readers that DVC is "largely true." Indeed, as the IHT also reported, it is precisely the truth claims that attracted the attention of Sony executives: "The amazing thing about this book is it's provocative: Is it all true? Isn't it true?" Perhaps no one has ever captured the basic problem with the truth claims made on behalf of DVC and its ilk better than C.S. Lewis, who observed in Mere Christianity that: "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of thing Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
All Dan Brown, Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, and that whole crew have accomplished is getting richer by saying that "really foolish thing."
Bainbridge's whole piece here.
Thursday, May 18. 2006
Canada is de-registering long guns and shotguns. Good for them. Isn't sanity a fine thing? Those of us who like to hunt in Canada will appreciate that, but I bet Canadian shooters will appreciate it even more. I have no doubt that their billion-dollar attempted gun registration system was designed to lead to total disarmament eventually, because it wouldn't help much with the bad guys - what bad guy would commit a crime with a legal gun? Cap'n Ed has more on the subject. And more at Canada's Small Dead Animals. Image: A favorite Maggie's Farm hunting location, in central Manitoba, last O ctober.
Time to plan your August cruise. Medium or small ships are the best places, because you can never forget that you are at sea. We are very fond of the Holland-America Line, and have been for fifty years. For all of their trips I have taken, my favorite remains the old NY to Southampton route. Chilly, foggy, and old-fashioned. No need for a fancy suite: being on the ship is the thing. Make that historic crossing before you grow too old to enjoy it. Forget the food: you can see whales, petrels, shearwaters, giant ocean swells, the rare passing ship, mist rolling in and, if you're lucky, a good North Atlantic storm that will stir the soul and spirit (and stomach). Walking a few miles around the Promenade Deck at 6 AM in the cool North Atlantic mist, on a jerkin' boat, is a very fine thing to do. Image below: MS Statendam 
Tuesday, May 16. 2006
 If your dogs need work - hunt-training, obedience, etc., and you are in the CT area, Rick emailed us to recommend Quinebaug Kennels:
Jennifer is doing a great job with Parker and Sammy, my two hunting labs. Maggies should put her site up. A lady who can train dogs AND shoot guns. Nice. http://www.quinebaugkennels.com/
Oh - she has a new litter of black labs - only hunters need inquire.
Monday, May 15. 2006
Sometimes you come across people you don't understand very well. Your mind doesn't work like theirs does. The muse that whispers in their ear is different than any other. Many see work like his, and wonder why anyone would ever make something like that. Others might wonder why it had never occurred to somebody before. Maybe it did, and they thought: That's nuts. I can't do that. It's not the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. It's not Art, or Science, or Boatbuilding, or Engineering, or any thing else in particular. It's just captivating, all by itself. The world is often a harsh and violent place. We argue and tussle over things great and small; but every once in a while someone like Livio de Marchi shows up, and injects a little whimsy in the proceedings, just for the love of it, just for fun. Visit his virtual museum, and see all the cures for the world's ills he sculpts from wood in Venice, Italy. He didn't cure cancer, but he sure cured Monday.
Saturday, May 13. 2006
 If you are a Tom Wolfe fan, you will enjoy the speech he gave as the Jefferson Lecture at the National Endowment for the Humanities on Wednesday, printed in the New York Sun. In this wide-ranging and a bit random essay, he discusses speech, status, Freud, neo-Darwinism, immigration, Max Weber, rednecks, politics, college kids, drugs, and a host of other matters. One quote:
Evolution came to an end when the human beast developed speech! As soon as he became not Homo sapiens, "man reasoning," but Homo loquax, "man talking"! Speech gave the human beast far more than an ingenious tool. Speech was a veritable nuclear weapon! It gave the human beast the powers of reason, complex memory, and long-term planning, eventually in the form of print and engineering plans. Speech gave him the power to enlarge his food supply at will through an artifice called farming. Speech ended not only the evolution of man, by making it no longer necessary, but also the evolution of animals! Our animal friends—we're very sentimental about predators these days, aren't we—the lions, the tigers, the wolves, the rhinoceroses, the great apes, kangaroos, leopards, cheetahs, grizzly bears, polar bears, cougars—they're "endangered," meaning hanging on for dear life. Today the so-called animal kingdom exists only at the human beast's sufferance. The beast has dealt crippling blows even to the unseen empire of the microbes. Stunted adults from Third World countries with abysmal sanitation come to the United States and their offspring grow six or more inches taller, thanks to the wonders of hygiene. Cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, turkeys would be extinct by now had not the human beasts hit upon the idea of animal husbandry. So far the human beast enjoys the luxury of crying sentimental tears over the deer because she's so pretty. But the day the human beast discovers deer in his cellar, fawns in his bedroom closet, bucks tangling horns in the attic at night above his very bedroom . . . those filthy oversized vermin, the deer, will be added to that big long list above. We're sentimental about the dolphins, because they're so smart. What about the tuna? It's okay to kill tunas by the ton because they're dimwits? It would take an evolutionary mystic (and there are such) to believe these animals will ever evolve their way out of the hole they're in thanks to man's power of speech.
Friday, May 12. 2006
Why can't "older" women find husbands? Joe explains it: For a woman of any age, finding a good man is a daunting task. By the age of forty, women find that all men are either (a) already married, (b) gay, or (c) idiots. Since the good ones are already taken, women have a choice of either stealing someone else’s man or stealing someone else’s man - and then converting them. Over the age of forty, women have a similar difficulty since all men are (a) still married, (b) still gay, or (c) dead.
 A quote from Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, after Lee's semi- boyfriend Cross loses a basketball game:
When the buzzer sounded, I looked at Cross and was astonished to see that he was crying. I looked away reflexively, then looked back; his face was scrunched-up and red, and he was roughly wiping his eyes and shaking his head, but he wasn't trying to hide it... Sports contained the truth, I decided, the unspoken truth (how quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound), and it seemed hard to believe that I had never understood this before. They rewarded effortlessness and unself-consciousness; they confirmed that yes, there are rankings of skill and value and that everyone knows what they are (seeing those guys who were subbed with two seconds left before the end of a quarter, I'd think how girl's coaches would never be that heartless); they showed that the best things in the world were to be young and strong and fast.
Thursday, May 11. 2006
I will be seeing an early pre-screening of the movie, and will share my impressions when I do. But I think I already know what they will be: Another solidly-made, tasteful, and very entertaining Ron Howard film, representing no danger either to God or man.
A Nukak tribe from the Colombian bush has arrived in town, and seems to enjoy the free food and shelter. NYT If it were the US, these folks would already be registered to vote.
 Quoted from the French feminist author Phyllis Chesler's new book, in a very entertaining mini-review at No Pasaran:
The kind of closed-minded "political correctness" which I have just described above is typical of groupthink and totalitarian thinking. If someone thinks for herself in an independent and creative way and dares to come up with non-party-line conclusions, she or he is then, in classic Orwellian style, deemed the enemy, a traitor, a non-person. Their work will not be read or discussed. They will not be invited to debate or to debate in a civilized and honorable way. They will be called a "racist" and a "neoconservative." If a feminist dares raise the specter of Jew-hatred and the demonization of the Jewish state among leftists and feminists, she will quickly discover that she has become unwelcome in the mainstream media and among leftists (who actually think of themselves as liberals), and among feminists.
Wednesday, May 10. 2006
From a fishin' song by Woody Guthrie: Well I went down to the fishing hole,
And I set down with my fishing pole;
Somethin' grabb'd my hook and it got my bait
And Jerked me out in the middle of the lake.
Huh it was some jump boy,
I got sunk, kinda baptized on credit. Jumped in the river and went down deep,
There was a hundred pound cat-fish lying there asleep,
Well I jumped on his back and rode him all aroun'
Saddled him up and I came into town.
People came runnin', lookin', dogs a-barkin'
(Kids a-squallin').
Proof that fishing is a fair sport. Fisherman killed by large catfish.
Opie likes to tell me about the thriving Cuban art scene. Not even Fidel and his cops and thought police can destroy the human soul. This from a young Cuban artist: 
 Kay Hymowitz reviews a new book by Flanagan: To Hell with all that: Loving and Loathing our Inner Housewife. The radical feminists hate her, but they should not: it's the radical feminists who "reinforce stereotypes." Who would want to be the kid of a radical feminist? Not me.
Quote from the excellent review: What Flanagan might have better underscored is that her real subject is not The Question: To Work Or Not To Work. It is love. Flanagan had a fierce devotion to her own mother, whose presence haunts the book. She experienced in her mother’s pot roasts and freshly ironed laundry the embodiment of comfort, safety, and love. Despite Flanagan’s deficiencies in the domestic arts, it’s a feeling she badly wants to bring to her own family. What this talented writer reminds us of are two simple truths that are apostasy to the fundamentalists and, sadly, lost to many young women who never saw them in action: that when working properly, satisfying domestic life can embody a mother’s love for her children, the most powerful love there is; and that no matter how women choose to live, this love will forever be entangled with self-sacrifice. Should this really be the stuff of war without end?
Whole thing at City Journal here - it's good, and funny. Image: A young woman gazing at the ocean at Cahoon's Hollow, wondering about her identity, feminist stereotyping, male oppression, and the meaning of life - and hoping she'll meet the tall, dark and handsome man of her dreams at the bar later on.
Truth is, I know a fair bit about algebra, and trig too, including many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse. I even remember key bits of calc. I have no idea how anyone can consider themselves educated if they do not. And it isn't all that difficult - it's simple logic. I can teach anyone, with an intact brain, the basics of algebra in an hour. After the basics, it's all fun and creative problem-solving. Good for the mind. Is it useful, or necessary? I would say so. There is not much that can be understood in depth without math. Silber at TCS takes on the reporters who "don't get it", (and thus surely cannot understand economics either, or statistics, science, or ...). It is difficult for me to believe that reporters would brag about not knowing basic math, but I guess it explains a lot. But how did the guy Silber mentions graduate from college, not to mention high school, without learning it? Good piece. He also touches on the long history of algebra.
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