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.
It's the deepest and most thoughtful stuff I have ever read about image-making and our responses to them, so dense with ideas that I can really only digest a sentence or two at a time.
Like most parents, at least those who care or don't give up, I argue with my son Jason about some of the music he listens to, the Rap music. Aside from its lack of musical skill, when I can get past the speed with which they speak, the jargon and the accents, the message is misogynistic and elevates drugs and violence. Yesterday, Jason told me about a rapper he'd been listening to, Marcus Hopson, who goes by the stage-name Hopsin. He is very successful and has gathered some other rappers to his recording company. In this video, below, you can understand the words, and I hope that others who listen to Hopsin will take them to heart. Warning, there is cussing in the video, NSFW. (In case you do not understand the words or want a record of them, here's the same rap with the words.)
Now, on to white trash. Yesterday I took Jason to see the film Ted. I thought it was supposed to be a funny movie about a grown man and his wise-acre living teddy bear. What a screw-up that was. Including pornography, I have never seen a film that had so much non-stop vulgar language, allusions, and behavior. To me this film is the epitome of the white trash mentality too common among our artistes and elites. Hollywood and the actors should really be ashamed of themselves. But, of course, aren't. -- I didn't hear anyone in the movie theater laughing.
"Milton Friedman, who would have turned 100 on Tuesday, helped to make free markets popular again in the 20th century. His ideas are even more important today":
Well over 200 million were liberated from poverty thanks to the rediscovery of the free market. And now as the world teeters close to another recession, leaders need to urgently rediscover Friedman's ideas.
I remember asking Milton, a year or so before his death, during one of our semiannual dinners in downtown San Francisco: What can we do to make America more prosperous? "Three things," he replied instantly. "Promote free trade, school choice for all children, and cut government spending."
How much should we cut? "As much as possible."
A Libertarian at heart. The man believed in American freedom from the state and had faith in human potential - when unleashed. Listening to him talk, for me, is like seeing the sun come out from behind a cloud.
And a 15-minute walk to the YMCA and the library. Plus a fairly dense neighborhood where kids can hop on their bike, or just walk down the street, and find tons of kids to hang out with and play ball with. How good is that?
The train would be the New Haven line (NYC to Boston). Fairfield is around an hour and 15 minutes by train to Grand Central Station. Not too bad, especially if you can get work done on the train. A little less time to New Haven. It's part of the "Gold Coast," but this neighborhood is more like Silver. Pricey for what little you get.
The lad and I took our annual journey to the great Pequot Library Book Sale in Southport, CT on Sunday afternoon, then spent a few minutes scouting out the Fairfield real estate (south of the Boston Post Road, near Long Island Sound), just for giggles - but thinking as investors.
With all of the amazing amenities, one might think these neighborhoods near the beaches would be charming as heck. They are not. They are mostly post-war, poorly-built and poorly-designed with lots of split-levels and other charmless ticky-tacky stuff, built on small lots on marsh fill and thus subject to flooding during big storms. But that's the price you pay to walk to the beach. Laws would not permit such wetlands construction today.
My lad says that post-war neighborhoods are rarely gentrified, or spruced-up, due to lack of charm and construction quality. Because of the local amenities and conveniences, the land here is worth about the same with house or without. It's mostly 1/4-acre lots, some less. That means the houses are what are termed "scrapers": the house adds no, or minimal, value to the lot. In fact, the cost of demolition detracts from the value. Those lots are valuable with or without a functional house - around $450-800,000, and well over a million post-scraping and rebuilding. As a result of the near-zero value of the building, many of them are not well-maintained or improved up to modern standards.
Only a few of them have been scraped and replaced by 3-story houses of indeterminate, ungainly style. (Due to setback requirements, you have to build up to 3 stories to get the square footage people want today.)
When people realize their houses are hopeless scrapers, they stop putting money into them and thus make the neighborhood - and themselves - look scruffy, dilapidated, or dysfunctional. Often, they are best off renting the darn thing. Here's an example of one below, a snout house I suppose, which has had nothing done since 1958 except paint. Landscaping, I think, by Home Depot. With a little effort in that department, it could look like a fairly good starter house or retirement shelter. An American flag over the entry, and some interesting landscaping, would add a lot to this basic dwelling without scraping it off.
(By the way, I hate those set-back zoning rules. Stupid. Houses could have friendly porches right off the street, and larger back yards for gardening, etc., without them. People making zoning rules are usually idiots. These are not exactly grand estates with gracious lawns full of grazing sheep.And, speaking of annoying zoning rules, these post-war neighborhoods are zoned as single-family residential, so there are no corner stores to walk to for coffee, a newspaper, an ice cream, or to chat with neighbors over a beer. You have to drive when anybody would prefer to push the stroller a few blocks for a coffee.)
Candlewood Lake in western CT is an 11-mile long man-made lake, built in 1924 for hydroelectric.
Excess power is used to pump water up hill from the nearby Housatonic River into the lake, then allowed to flow back into the river through pipes and turbines when power is needed. An interesting engineering idea.
Turbines, of course, are not healthy for anadromous fish, but Candlewood Lake is good for bass fishing, water-skiing, and swimming.
Carl Hiassen has a new book out, Chomp, for young readers. Other of his books offer hilarious south Florida black humor for grown-ups.
What did I just begin reading? Mark Twain's 1867 Innocents Abroad. Since we're taking a pass on a Europe trip this summer, thought I'd read about what ship cruising was like right when the concept was invented - his trip was advertised as a "pleasure excursion." From the blurb:
Innocents Abroad began as a series of travel letters written by Mark Twain mainly for the Alta California, a San Francisco paper that sponsored his participation in the trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 aboard the steamship Quaker City. On the excursion from New York to Palestine they traveled a distance of over 20,000 miles by land and sea through France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Morocco, Russia, Turkey and Egypt. Through his humorous and insightful writings, Twain describes countries, nations, incidents and his amazing adventures.
Apropos of (is it necessary to use "of" after "apropos"?) our post a while ago about scientific research, here is Dr. Ionnadis's famous essay: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.
It's a classic, and a good antidote to "the experts say..." and "studies show." Thanks for the reminder, reader.
Interesting to note that, the hotter the topic, the less reliable the findings. In the social sciences, it's far worse. Mostly garbage, I think.
I am science-trained, and it made me a skeptic about everything I read.
Judging only from this clip, what religion is Natalie Portman?
Bonus point question:
What nation was she born in?
If you didn't get it and don't mind lowering yourself to the level of dog drool by cheating and thus shredding any last vestige of self-respect, highlight the following line with the mouse for a clue:
Blacks had more political power in Chicago than ever before, yet that power had no impact on the tidal wave of dysfunction that was sweeping through the largest black community in the United States. Chicago had just elected Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor; the heads of Chicago’s school system and public housing were black, as were most of their employees; black power broker Emil Jones, Jr. represented the South Side in the Illinois State Senate; Jesse Jackson would launch his 1984 presidential campaign from Chicago. The notion that blacks were disenfranchised struck even some of Obama’s potential organizees as ludicrous. “Why we need to be protesting and carrying on at our own people?” a prominent South Side minister asked Obama soon after he arrived in Chicago. “Anybody sitting around this table got a direct line to City Hall.”
The article is deeply depressing. The concepts of planning and of delayed gratification seem to be lost. It's consistent with my theory that many or maybe most people will go feral unless raised to civilization. Lord of the Flies. Is this the product of government policy? I think so. Nobody lived this way before The Great Society, and now it has become its own multigenerational subculture.
It also seems clear to me that these teen mothers do not want husbands anyway. Why would they want to marry unreliable losers, drop-outs, or gang members? Or anybody? In my view, government can do nothing to fix what they have irretrievably broken in the name of compassion. Rich, poor, or in-between, big government programs lock people into things and inhibit change. Tragic. Another 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.
Maybe we need laws to prevent Corporate Greed from impregnating innocent teens. And we need more government services. That would solve it all.
Insty points out that much of the financial "inequality" in the US is due to the marriage gap. Wonder of wonders, even the NYT is finally willing to discuss the forbidden topic: Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’. It's not news. Sen. Pat Moynihan famously warned about this decades ago, but the subject was judged to be politically incorrect.
Why is it a forbidden topic? I can think of at least two reasons. One is fear of the racial aspect, although no race has a monopoly on single motherhood. My second reason is the knee-jerk refusal to judge based on bourgeois life style choices, or some such Marxist baloney.
Even with government functioning as a modest trust fund for many, having kids outside marriage is not a recipe for a good, orderly life (from my petit bourgeois standpoint, of course). It's not mostly about income - it's about functionality, support, structure, partnership, responsibility, committment, teamwork. This is not a secret. The income part is just an extra side-effect if two people have jobs.
As best I can tell, it takes at least two people to raise kids properly. Ideally, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and close family friends around too. Nannies or babysitters if you can afford them. Tribally, in extended family and in community. Income doesn't really matter much. Kids thrive on Cheerios, Wonder Bread and baloney, macaroni and cheese, hamburgers, and Fluffernutter. I did. 6'2" and fairly strong.
They are dying, and not very slowly. We have often posted on this topic. The reason is obvious: these churches have been co-opted, captured by soft or firm Lefties who have replaced the search for Truth for political attitudes. People want God, but they are delivering pet funerals.
I suppose you could call that one aspect of "the long march through the institutions." Non-profits and other sorts of do-gooder organizations are vulnerable to being corrupted by that sort of activism because they often attract a certain sort of person.
My Protestant church is bursting at the seams with tons of young couples and tons of little kids. I know our pastors pretty well, but have no idea what they think about any political or otherwise controversial topic. Nor do I care, because they view their job as one of saving souls through Christ and that's what they do. Lots of people hunger for that.
There are many reasons people take two hours on Sunday morning to go to church, but politics and trendy silliness are not among them.
Today... the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests that perhaps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.
Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.
From Akasie: What Ails the Episcopalians - Its numbers and coffers shrinking, the church votes for pet funerals but offers little to the traditional faithful:
General Convention is also notable for its sheer ostentation and carnival atmosphere. For seven straight nights, lavish cocktail parties spilled into pricey steakhouses, where bishops could use their diocesan funds to order bottles of the finest wines.
During the day, legislators in the lower chamber, the House of Deputies, and the upper chamber, the House of Bishops, discussed such weighty topics as whether to develop funeral rites for dogs and cats, and whether to ratify resolutions condemning genetically modified foods. Both were approved by a vote, along with a resolution to "dismantle the effects of the doctrine of discovery," in effect an apology to Native Americans for exposing them to Christianity.
Re the latter, so much for mission work, I guess. "Gee, I'm sorry we told you about Jesus"! My view of ministry is simple. Preach the Word to all, visit the sick, inspire the marrying and comfort the bereaved. Mostly, preach the Word of God. What people decide to do with the lessons should be no concern of churches.
Greatest rock band ever? Could be. Is Let It Bleed their best record? Highly debatable.
Funny to think that Keith Richards now lives a quiet, humble, ordinary suburban life in leafy, winding road Connecticut, same as Paul Simon and many rockers and movie stars. I think many sane stars yearn for the quiet and ordinary where they can try to be relatively anonymous and to be the ordinary people they are at heart.
I'll never forget the first time I heard the Let It Bleed record. The girlfriend too, in vivid detail. However, I could say that about quite a number of pop records.
People prone to collectivist fantasies seek to escape the struggles of their present life and transport themselves to a place where mankind has triumphed over the adversities of the “mundane” to frolic like gods amongst the stars.
Now, imagine you are one of these desperate men or women, and someone promises you in a rather convincing manner that their system of social structure and governance will bring that sterling-silver-gravity-defying-Star-Trek-future to you. What would you be willing to trade for even a glimpse into the next epoch? Some, sadly, are willing to trade everything, including their freedoms...
I have told you several times in the past about my local master gunsmith, Italy-trained in some of the finest hand-made gun shops in the world, who put up ads in our high school for seven years inviting applicants to apprentice with him. He never got a single reply, and gave up the effort.
When he died a few years ago, alas (when he was charging $175/hr for labor and had more work than he could handle), all of his skills in wood and in machining gun parts died with him. A damn shame. An expert shot with rifle and shotgun, too.
Mike Rowe claims that people look down on people who know how to do real things. Do they really? Most people seem to admire or envy people who can do real things. Nobody admires people because they can use Powerpoint. Anyway, this via Eratosthenes:
There are two sorts of Americans, the "What can I get?" Americans and the "What can I do?" Americans.
Some folks might wade through the Rio Grande for "What can I get?", but I think most of them, like the ones who immigrate from further afield, come because of "What can I do?" Nowadays, it's mostly smart, ambitious Asians who can write code but are also willing to do the night shifts at the minimarts (kind of crazy to see work-free Americans on welfare in the minimart lines while the Asian or Haitian keeps busy at the check-out counter practicing his or her English and studying some textbook between customers).
Land of Opportunity, and all that. Whining and whinging not allowed here. There is still more freedom here to pursue your life goals than anywhere on earth, and leisure is not a traditional American life goal. In fact, the original Americans considered leisure to be disreputable if not shameful except on Sunday, after church.
It was the banks that first felt the lash of Mr Hollande’s tongue when he declared that his “true adversary” was not Mr Sarkozy but “the world of finance”. The president, who has spent almost his entire career in the public sector or working for his party, once said: “I don’t like the rich."
If you hate the world of finance, don't borrow and don't invest. It's simple. Also strange, since Hollande has become very wealthy working all his life for government and in politics, and all of his friends and girlfriends are rich. He has the parasitic mind, and parasites hate their hosts because they are ashamed of their dependency.
I've been reading a bit about how western forest fires could be prevented, or reduced, by human intervention. I am opposed to that. Wildfire is a natural occurrence, and forest regeneration is a natural and necessary process and one upon which many species depend. It's well-known that fire-prevention eventuates in bigger fires.
If you want to live in the woods where fire is eventually expected, don't do it on my nickel. While I must admire the valiant forest-fire-fighters, I don't know why I am paying for them. There are dangers in the woods. Cougars, wolves, fires, bears, snakes, crazy rivers, etc. Nobody is forced to live there.
Same goes for federally-subsidized flood insurance. Seems like a no-brainer to me. Why should my tax dollars subsidize somebody to live where there is a predictable expectation of flooding? Or hurricanes or tornadoes?
Perhaps this sounds "insensitive," but adults are expected to calculate their risks in life and not come crying to me when the odds turn against them. I can be charitable when I choose to be, but I don't want to be forced by government to subsidize other peoples' adult choices.
An angry client today told me how pissed he was that the bank wouldn't swallow his $250,000 loss in the home he needs to sell now. I pointed out to him the obvious fact that he was implying that he would have been happy to keep any gain on the house, but not any loss. Then I pointed out that, if somebody wants to give up loss and to give up gain, then they should rent. When you rent, the landlord or the bank takes the risks.
In my long life experience, the more responsibility people take for their decisions and their consequences, the better and more careful decisions they make.
I blundered my way across a fairly interesting site a while back called Life's Little Mysteries. It struck a deep nerve because I realized it was answering the very questions that haunt all people of vast and superior intellect. Questions such as:
Having recently put two documentaries on the Japanese tsunami/Fukushima meltdown on my Special Vids page, I had an interest in Does Radioactive Tuna Mean Fukushima Was Worse than Expected? (I believe the answer to that last one would be 'yes', since the meltdown at Fukushima wasn't 'expected' at all)
It's a laff riot as Rep. Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, quizzes some Obama stooges officials on what constitutes a 'green' job:
But it's still guffaws galore as even Rep. Issa wasn't aware how all-encompassing the 'creative accounting' had gone:
"Milton Friedman, who would have turned 100 on Tuesday, helped to make free markets popular again in the 20th century. 
And a 15-minute walk to the YMCA and the library. Plus a fairly dense neighborhood where kids can hop on their bike, or just walk down the street, and find tons of kids to hang out with and play ball with. How good is that?
Mrs. BD is a big iPhone fan. The other night, she was showing me an iTunes University lecture from a Yale prof on her phone. It was pretty good.
Apropos of (is it necessary to use "of" after "apropos"?) our post a while ago about scientific research, here is Dr. Ionnadis's famous essay: 
I blundered my way across a fairly interesting site a while back called 