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.
There are some grim aspects to her report from the front lines of the follow-your-impulses approach to life, but, in the end, I have to comment that I think it's just great that, in America, there is the freedom and opportunity to construct a life any way one chooses.
As long as I do not have to end up supporting it, that is. Despite all of her opportunities, I fear we all may end up supporting her in her old age, if she achieves it. True bohemians are supposed to die young-ish, of TB, cirrhosis, drug overdose, AIDS, broken heart, or other such romantic maladies:
The right of the people to keep and bear arms is an extension of the natural right to self-defense and a hallmark of personal sovereignty.
His focus on natural rights is the main issue. In my big-picture view, American citizens do not have delimited rights, but government does have delimited powers over the citizen. Neither the "common good" nor the "greater good," however construed, are citizens of the US.
In non-American history, the masses and peasants were forbidden ownership of arms (back when the penetrating weapon of choice was the sword). America was, and remains, different, revolutionary.
Governments are always uncomfortable with an armed populace. Canada, which just gave up on its program of national firearm registration, should not have been surprised to discover that a giant and costly registry of honest gun owners was of no use at all.
I have written about the illusion of a state of Happiness in the past here. In doing so, I have always pointed out that it's a term without a meaningful definition. However, it has always seemed to me that happiness implies, for some, an imaginary infantile state in which all wants and needs are met rather than the state of stress, difficulty, and challenge which many of us seek.
For a simple example, I have a friend who never feels "happier" than when struggling for hours in a fruitless effort to master a Chopin piano piece.
Transient joys and delights certainly occur, as can periods of contentment with their implication of acceptance of, or resignation to, the limits of reality.
Leszek Kołakowski poses the question Is God Happy? (h/t Althouse) as a way to reflecting about the human capacity for happiness. He says:
Happiness is something we can imagine but not experience. If we imagine that hell and purgatory are no longer in operation and that all human beings, every single one without exception, have been saved by God and are now enjoying celestial bliss, lacking nothing, perfectly satisfied, without pain or death, then we can imagine that their happiness is real and that the sorrows and suffering of the past have been forgotten. Such a condition can be imagined, but it has never been seen. It has never been seen.
Kolakowski clearly adopts the definition of happiness to which I alluded earlier, ie, the serene absence of any disturbing thoughts or feelings. Sounds more like a mindless beach vacation to me than something anybody would aspire to for more than a few days. Sounds like heroin.
Regarding the question re God's happiness, it's an absurd question. God is not human.
You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... You can get arrested for expired tags on your car but not for being in the country illegally.
==================================== You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... Your government believes that the best way to eradicate trillions of dollars of debt is to spend trillions more of our money.
==================================== You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... A seven year old boy can be thrown out of school for calling his teacher "cute" but hosting a sexual exploration or diversity class in grade school is perfectly acceptable.
==================================== You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... The Supreme Court of the United States can rule that lower courts cannot display the 10 Commandments in their courtroom, while sitting in front of a display of the 10 Commandments.
==================================== You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... Children are forcibly removed from parents who appropriately discipline them while children of "underprivileged" drug addicts are left to rot in filth infested cesspools of a crackhouse. ==================================== You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... Hard work and success are rewarded with higher taxes and government intrusion, while some slothful, lazy behavior is rewarded with EBT cards, WIC checks, Medicaid, subsidized housing, and free cell phones.
==================================== You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... The government's plan for getting people back to work is to provide 99 weeks of unemployment checks (to not work).
==================================== You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... Being self-sufficient is considered a threat to the government.
==================================== You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... Politicians think that stripping away the constitution is really protecting the rights of the people.
==================================== You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... The rights of the Government come before the rights of the individual.
==================================== You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... You can write a post like this just by reading the news headlines.
==================================== You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... You pay your mortgage faithfully, denying yourself the newest big screen TV while your neighbor defaults on his mortgage (while buying iPhones, TV's and new cars) and the government forgives his debt and reduces his mortgage (with your tax dollars).
==================================== You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... Being stripped of the ability to defend yourself makes you "safe".
==================================== You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... You have to have your parents signature to go on a school field trip but not to get an abortion.
==================================== You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... An 80 year old woman can be stripped searched by the TSA but a Muslim woman in a burka is only subject to having her neck and head searched.
One of Myers’s recurring themes is the ways in which the dumbing down of the general culture has infected American Christianity and conservatism. These are two spheres where we might expect the work of “preserving cultural treasures” to be taken up. Yet wander into a Mass or worship service in any suburban Catholic or Protestant church and you’ll hear “praise songs” that might have been lifted from Sesame Street or, if the service is High Church, the soundtrack of Phantom of the Opera. It’s hard to believe this is the same religion that inspired Bach and Palestrina, whose choral works are no more familiar to the average pastor or parishioner than the chants at a Kikuyu circumcision ceremony. The liturgy, what’s left of it, is either pedestrian or absurd. (The Shepherd who used to maketh you to lie down in green pastures will now, if you’re a Catholic, “in verdant pastures give you repose.”) Among clergy no less than the laity, a desire for beauty and reflection is deemed prissy and dull.
How's that for a catchy end-of-holiday-season header? (Metazoans is the new name for the Animalia Kingdom - those creatures with differentiated tissues like sponges, earthworms, and people.)
I have been attempting to familiarize myself a little with the rapidly-expanding science of Epigenetics lately. When I took pre-med Genetics, it was a marginal topic. Now that the fundamental workings of DNA are fairly well understood, epigenetics has become a hot field ("epi" because it's the things - heritable things - that effect cell-differentiation, growth and development, etc. on top of the basic DNA template, but are affected by the environment). Shades of Lamarck.
Epigenetics is interesting partly because it's one of the ways that a metazoan species can be affected by environmental influences during growth and development. Molecular tools for shaping the final product. The complexity of metazoans (as contrasted with fungi, bacteria, and protozoans, for example) requires complex epigenetic processes. Heritable things which switch on or switch off gene expression.
Here's the simplest short piece I could find: What Is Epigenetics? Easy to follow if you ever took intro Bio.
The wiki entry is actually a good intro, but tough sledding unless you had a decent college education or are a bio reader.
Our pal Sipp crawled into his well-air-conditioned office in Maine to offer this thought about the blue house pics I posted on Tuesday night:
That's a beautiful house. Front-gabled Greek Revival. Mid-1800s. It was so common it was called the "National Style" back then. After the War of 1812, Americans didn't want to build their houses in the Adam (British) style anymore. They were captivated by the Greek War of Independence from the Ottomans, and got interested in everything ancient Greek because it was considered a chaste, proto-Roman civilization. I can't see all that much in the pictures for evidence of what's going on, but the house in the front is original. The big thing in the back was probably a barn at first. That huge chimney on the barn is pretty modern. It was probably attached to the main house by the ell you see between them. (In Maine, they called something similar Little House, Big House, Back House, Barn, with the little house being the "ell" and being built first) The ell might have been one-story at first. When horses and servants went out of fashion, the barn was turned into more house, most likely, and a second floor added to the ell to have unfettered access back and forth. The wart on the side might have been an open porch, or been missing entirely at first. Nobody ganged windows like that back then.
I doubt that big house in back was ever a barn, but I get the point.
How good is this little patch, up high above the Connecticut river? You have several of your basic old-timey styles, and I'd bet they were all built by the same family on the same lot over time and generations (no estate taxes and no zoning then), middle one first - I'd guess around 1750-1780:
Nathaniel Baum-Snow of Brown University found that each new highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18 percent. The home mortgage interest deduction further encouraged suburbanization, because rental units are disproportionately in cities while owner-occupied homes are disproportionately distant from city centers.
Note - sorry, those older links are now behind a paywall. Greedy capitalists at the Boston Globe are messing up our efforts to give them business.
More Yankeeland architectural pics tomorrow. One aspect of the traditional ethos is to make a home appear humbler and smaller, than it is. One way to do that is to make them narrow in the front, but to run on in the back with endless additions and attachments.
This is not an inn, it's a family homestead. Could have been an inn at some point in history. Here's the full view, behind the trees, Hard to determine which part came first, but Sipp can probably explain the cobbling here. I tend to guess that the Federal front part came second, but I can't be sure:
Good advice, for bloggers and for everyone, from Wizbang:
Never say anything you would not be willing to repeat under oath.
Never say or write anything you would not want to see plastered across the front page of the newspaper.
Never write when you can speak.
Never speak when you can nod.
Never nod when you can wink
Well, I am not a winker but I would add, as lawyers always advise, "Say it in flowers, say it in mink, but never, ever, say it in ink." I'm afraid that I break all of these rules, daily, as I have a perverse tendency to actively resist PC just for the fun of it. Fortunately, I have no employer to object. That's the Maggie's Ideal Way of Life.
Remember flying a kite as a kid? It's a pretty simple task, really, in the sense that (1) all you have to do is hold onto the string, and (2) as you proved, even a kid can do it.
And I'm sure you know that there are people who can make kites do some pretty nifty tricks, like barrel rolls and loops and all that.
And what's extra special is when you get three people flying three kites together, performing a beautiful aerial ballet.
The books from the people who know my reading tastes and tendencies but are always trying to nudge me towards a slightly higher fiction ratio. Having been rid of TV for the past few months, my reading rate has not increased at all because I never turned the thing on anyway. Who has time for TV when there is life to be lived, and a website to be edited?
I prefer dead-tree books to digital. Precious things. This is all great stuff to nourish brain and soul:
Mark Helprin: In Sunlight and in Shadow
Leonardo Sciasia: The Wine Dark Sea
Tom Reiss: The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo
Guiseppi di Lampedusa: The Leopard (I can't believe I've never read this classic, but Mrs. BD decided it was time that I did)
Andrew Motion: Silver: Return to Treasure Island
Giles Foden: Turbulence
Orhan Pamuk: Snow
Sandra Benjamin: Sicily: Three Thousand Years of Human History
Louise Dickinson Rich: We Took To The Woods
Frank Oppell (ed): Tales of Old New England (Who knew that Boston used to export ice to India?)
A powerful report from Heather MacDonald: Chicago's Real Crime Story - Why decades of community organizing haven't stemmed the city's youth violence.
I cannot pick out one juicy quote because the whole sad thing is of a piece: moral, family, and cultural breakdown since the 1960s. These kids are growing up in something between anarchy and Lord of the Flies. One quote:
Some members of Chicago’s Left will argue against holding fathers or mothers responsible for their children. “To blame it on the family is totally unfair,” says Gwen Rice, a board member of the Developing Communities Project. “I’m tired of blaming the parents. The services for the poor are paltry; it boggles the mind. Historically, you can’t expect a parent who can’t get a job to do something that someone with resources can do. These problems have histories; there are policies that have mitigated against black progress. What needs to happen is a change in corporate greed and insensitivity.” Rice corrects my use of the term “illegitimacy”: “There are no illegitimate births,” she says.
Winter in central New England entails jump-starters, oil lamps and lanterns, snow-blowers, snow plows, flashlights, snow shovels, plenty of firewood, hats and long-johns, and good gloves and boots of all sorts. Global cooling will be here soon. Oh, and 4WD for the sissies and the city-folk for whom a little snow and ice are daunting - and for your plow truck. Gas generators? We country folk don't go in for those.
I keep one of these charged up in the garage, and it came in handy when one of the tractors, rarely used this summer, had both a dead battery and squishy front tires Saturday. I had been using the Ford all summer, and figured I ought to get the Farmall moving a little to prevent Tractor Arthritis.
What was my chore? Heading up into the woods with the wagon to clear our cross-country ski trails of fallen trees, and to accumulate some more firewood in the process.
When I decided on a scientific career, one of the things that appealed to me about science was the modesty of its practitioners. The typical scientist seemed to be a person who knew one small corner of the natural world and knew it very well, better than most other human beings living and better even than most who had ever lived. But outside of their circumscribed areas of expertise, scientists would hesitate to express an authoritative opinion. This attitude was attractive precisely because it stood in sharp contrast to the arrogance of the philosophers of the positivist tradition, who claimed for science and its practitioners a broad authority with which many practicing scientists themselves were uncomfortable.
The temptation to overreach, however, seems increasingly indulged today in discussions about science. Both in the work of professional philosophers and in popular writings by natural scientists, it is frequently claimed that natural science does or soon will constitute the entire domain of truth.
another quote:
Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises — from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics — seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence. Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole. The ultimate outcome will be an increase of radical skepticism that questions the ability of science to address even the questions legitimately within its sphere of competence. One longs for a new Enlightenment to puncture the pretensions of this latest superstition.
Been in the City lately? I have. Love the vitality of it, the spirit, the pretty people. Best place in the world at Christmastime when everything and every corner is hopping. It is uplifting, invigorating, inspiring.
McSorley's is one of the great old pubs, but there are so many.
McSorley's allows ladies to enter nowadays, but it's really still a guy place. I puked in their bathroom one time as a youth. "Boot and rally," as we say. Not a sacred place - just old, uncomfortable, dusty, and rickety. Perfect.
Well, I think the Heller case sort of settled it. As I say, the only problem is criminals with illegal guns. America doesn't have too many guns, it has too many crims. When we figure out how to effectively control criminals and the violent insane...
Here's my proposal: First, the government removes all illegal weapons from all of the criminals and from the violent insane. This would require a major, nation-wide undertaking. Second step, as a sign of faith in their effort, the government removes all weapons from their own bodyguards and the bodyguards of the wealthy and celebs. Then we can talk about reasonable rules for civil society and for us ordinary, rule-following citizens. Historically, only aristocrats could be armed with swords or whatever. God forbid the humble, honest peasants like us have access to weapons too.
I saw at Drudge that WalMart is almost sold out of firearms this Christmas. Guys and gals both enjoy a fun new firearm to play with. So do kids. Many if not most American boys remember their first .22 under the Christmas tree. I sure do. My Dad, a US Army vet, university professor, opera- and ballet-lover, taught me everything about it, safety, assembly, cleaning, everything. Good stuff. The smell of that Hoppe's cleaning fluid always takes me back to the farm's kitchen table covered with newspaper with gun-oil stains, just like Proust's madeleine brought him back. I destroyed countless beer bottles and coke cans with that rifle.
He also got us a powerful clay target-thrower when we moved into shotguns. Since then, I have enjoyed the challenge of shotgunning more than rifles but I still have a few rifles in the closet. Not sure how many because we never use them. Farm tradition always had a loaded 12 ga. leaning against the kitchen wall like any other farm tool, and a loaded revolver in the kitchen drawer with the pliers and scissors and balls of string. Country-style, I guess. My Mom is/was a champion with skeet and trap, better than me because of her relaxed, serene focus.
I love hunting, but only hunters know that shooting guns is only a small part of it. That's why it's not called "shooting." Self-protection? I don't really need it now but we have had problems at the farm where, in a very isolated place far from government control, a firearm would be handy for justice purposes or to civilize an insane Black Bear.
Handguns? Well, I figger my concealed carry permit should be enough to deter bad guys because I have never actually carried except in the trunk of the car. Might be amusing for people to wear the carry permit on their Brooks Brothers sports jacket as a deterrent to trouble.
I often hear complaints that many colleges appear to have limits to how many Asians they want to accept. I have heard it said that "Asians are the new Jews", recalling when elite colleges elected to keep their Jewish component low.
It's understood that no competitive college wants to fill a class with nothing but kids with perfect SAT scores (just joking about the stereotype) who play concert violin, but at what point does discrimination against eyelid contour begin to exist?
I'd like to see color-blind and ethnicity-blind admissions. We all know what colleges are looking for - bright, curious, and hard-working kids who are likely to be a credit to the school and who can fill some sort of slot in the construction of a class, eg they will want a few lacrosse players, a sailor or two, a cellist, some literary types, some genius science geeks, some kids who have shown unique initiative in life, etc.
Judge Napolitano 
I have written about the illusion of a state of Happiness in the past here. In doing so, I have always pointed out that it's a term without a meaningful definition. However, it has always seemed to me that happiness implies, for some, an imaginary infantile state in which all wants and needs are met rather than the state of stress, difficulty, and challenge which many of us seek.
"In the battle over gun rights in America, both sides have distorted history and the law, and there’s no resolution in sight."