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.
Cahoon Hollow is a beach in Wellfleet, on good old unfancy lower (ie, upper, or outer) Cape Cod. It's their only ocean beach with a bar/restaurant - The Beachcomber - in an old life-saving station. They have bands. I believe Sippican played there in his dissipated youth.
The area is undeveloped thanks to JFK's Cape Cod National Seashore. Sometimes government does good things - but usually not. If you like warm water, the Cape Cod beaches are not for you. And unlike California beaches, at Cape Cod beaches people sit under beach umbrellas, sometimes have to wear wind-breakers in August, and tend to bury their heads in books while the cheerful sand fleas nip at their ankles.
These beaches attract some surfers, but the main water activity is body surfing: exhilarating fun, endlessly challenging, and the turbulence will pull down a gal's bikini top in an instant. Modest gals who like to body surf do not wear bikinis.
Lots of seals to swim with out there in August. The occasional Great White Shark, too. No fraidy cats allowed.
I used to think I could be important, and ordered my life accordingly. Now I realize I’m not and try my best to simply know, understand, and do my duty.
What I think what they mean is "Is being Conservative a mental ailment?" After all, people routinely change their political views with life experience. Anyway, in my view it's a stupid and pointless question.
This biological or psychic determinism -- the peculiar notion that fundamental political differences "don't really have anything in particular to do with politics" -- should explain liberals as well as conservatives. Most of its practitioners, however, seem to assume that liberal values such as fairness and compassion are, for lack of a better term, normal and that it is conservatives' beliefs and values that are different, even deviant, and thus in need of explanation... John Jost, a professor of psychology at NYU, sees conservative "aversion to ambiguity, a sense of threats, and disgust." Scott Eidelman, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas, says "conservatives generally crave closure, prefer to act quickly, choose instinctive solutions." Riley Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State, thinks the effort to be fair and balanced is misguided. "I'm not personally convinced that there is an equal balance of bias," he says. "I believe that we see things like authoritarianism, dogmatism, closed-mindedness, to be distributed currently more on the right than on the left
What crimes have you been subject to in your lifetime? - Not including ordinary rip-offs, school-age or barroom fist-fights, or unpaid invoices.
I'll start it off. I had a car stolen in Hartford about 15 years ago, and we had five saddles stolen from the barn about 6 years ago while vacationing. That's all I can recall. Never anything with violence or threat of violence, thank God. Well, I did run from two would-be young muggers in Cambridge many years ago when I was fleet of foot. Got into my car on a dark street before they caught up with me. I have a CT carry permit now, but I never carry out of state. That's jail time.
I lay on the grass, counting tweety-birds, after falling off the top step of a 12-foot ladder while trimming a tree in the front yard, my 12-year old son’s concerned face looking down at me. My father, who could and did do anything he set his mind to, until the day he died in his eighties, also stared down at me. At 64, I had something important to live up to and pass on to my son, so I forced myself to get up, smile, and say, “let’s get back to work” (ibuprofen to secretly follow later).
“NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP reads a plaque behind Dole.” So ends a respectful interview, “Great American”, with 88-year old former Senator Bob Dole by an otherwise snarky toward Republicans young lady from GQ. The young lady can't let go of the diminished physical condition of the man before her, but can't hide the respect and awe at his life. From athelete to crippled veteran to candidate for President to helping today's war wounded, Bob Dole gave all of himself, which stands tall before her.
As it so happens, this morning brought home that message from several other accomplished old men interviewed by my local newspaper, stirring me to talk about other old men and women with whom I spoke or chat with now on the phone. Their politics vary but they all came from impoverished roots here or abroad, are self-made, involved themselves fully in our national life. From my youth to now they share their anecdotes with their younger friend, from my callow days to me now at 64, as I sat or now sit figuratively enthralled at their feet listening. In their twilight years, still, they never never never give up, regardless the challenge, price or risk.
It’s their sense of duty to things greater than themselves, their love of country, which has animated them from youth to old age, a sense of humility before the obligation to pass on a better, stronger, decent world in which the only limitations are those placed on self. From famous labor leaders and former communists or socialists to industrialists to globe-trotting journalists and diplomats to national political figures to best-selling artists, authors and academics, all of theireyes sparkle and inspire as their self-effacing words did and do inspire me.
I met Bob Dole in the early 1970s, at the height of his political power, as he took the time to encourage me. I met the others either at the height of their successes or after. They took time to talk with me, answer my ignorant questions with enlightenment, and kick me in the ass when I dithered or wandered. I could list their names and the lessons they shared with me, but that would fill another several thousand words to even be very brief.
After years of hectoring him to write down some of his encounters with the famous and formative people who he met as an international journalist from the last days of WWII to now, a friend and mentor is now doing so. I hope to help him get it published. He laughed at me for constantly needling him to set his anecdotes down, saying no one cares anymore. I find myself saying similar to younger friends who similarly needle me to write it down. Maybe I will...if I make it to my eighties. You probably had or have similar people in your life. They need to be reminded that someone cares and many more will care if you help their lessons to be remembered by passing it on.
I have been cursed throughout the years with perfect pitch.
And, amazingly, the Yankees don't want me.
I mean in the musical sense, of course. And, after a thorough, exhaustive 2-minute search through Wikipedia, it appears the precise nature of my affliction is known as 'relative pitch', or, in medical terms, relativepitchitis. That is, I can hear a note being just the teensiest bit off.
My first clue that I was crippled with this life's burden was when a group of us rowdy college students went up to Seattle and visited the World's Fair, which had taken place a few years earlier. Space Needle and all that. There was a machine that would issue a tone for a few seconds, then you tried to match it exactly using a variable dial. I was the only one of five who could do it, and did it three times in a row.
It's been pretty much downhill ever since.
When I walk into a night club with a live band, everyone else is thinking, "Hey, what a great lead guitarist!" Me, I'm thinking, "His high E-string is a little flat! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!"
Cursed, I tell you.
Which brings me to Barbra Streisand, Celine Dion and Sarah Brightman.
While putting together my Penn & Teller: Fool Us post, I couldn't help but notice how striking the background music was in the fourth clip. I eventually hunted it down and discovered it was the main theme song to Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 remake of The Phantom of the Opera.
Since this is a musical, not a movie, there aren't any videos of the entire song being sung by the original performers, Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman, but they gave a live performance at the 1988 Tony Awards that featured the last verse of the song, merging into the musical's second-most popular tune, 'Music of the Night'.
Since we here at Maggie's Farm aim to be the best darn-tootin' blog site around, offering the Maggie's Valued Readers™ (that would be you slobs) something that no other site in town has to offer, I've employed the wonders of digital magic to combine the sound track of the first part of the song from a YouTube clip with the clip from the Tonys.
Maestro, take it away.
That crowd certainly got its money's worth.
The lyrics to the theme song are here. I have another clip below the fold.
Maggie's Farm readers are frequent guests of Bird Dog on his visits to the arts in Manhattan. I was shocked, really, actually shocked, when Bird Dog told me he'd never been to Brooklyn. By itself, Brooklyn is the 4th largest city in the United States. About 10% of Americans' families trace their families to originally being Brooklynites. Many of America's most famous celebrities hailed from Brooklyn, ranging from the early Dutch settlers who also bought Manhattan for trinkets and Thomas Paine, John Greeleaf Whittier and Walt Whitman, Mae West and W.C. Fields, George Gershwin and Aaron Copeland, John Steinbeck and Joseph Heller, Woody Allen and Barbara Streisand (my sister was at Erasmus Hall High School with her, Erasmus having the highest number of Westinghouse and National Merit Scholars in the nation), Lena Horne and W.E.B. DuBois, Gil Hodges and Sandy Koufax, to .........the list goes on and on. It contains top flight colleges. Prospect Park rivals Central Park. Its restaurants and arts are world class. There are far more beautiful brownstones than anywhere else. And, then, to top it off, its beaches have been New York's summer playgrounds and winter strolls for generations. One of those beach communities, next to Coney Island, is Brighton Beach. My grandmother and, later, my mother, in their old age lived in Brighton Beach highrises looking over the Atlantic and if you craned your neck you could see the Statue of Liberty. Here's a terrific photo homage to the Brooklyn that I grew up in. The video below is about Brighton Beach today, a thriving enclave for Russian emigres. They settled there because most were Jewish and the area was Jewish.
Bird Dog, doggit, you've got to get thee to Brooklyn, often. Manhattan midtown is where people not from New York City hang out, missing the real New York City.
Like a cross between a kayak and a surfboard. Probably invented by cavemen on logs, but new again.
They look like good clean fun. A friend of mine takes her dog on it with her. Her husband fly-fishes for Stripers and Blues off one in Block Island Sound, and looks down on decadent fishermen on comfy boats. I can picture a thrilling Nantucket Sleigh Ride with a fat Striper on the line. Cool ride.
There is always space for new sorts of water fun. I was told that a local joint sold out of them on Father's Day, at $700-2000 per board.
Apparently you can surf on them, if you have some sense of fun, but getting wet is part of it all. Generally, you have to keep your knees bent to do the balancing thing when there's a good chop or wavy gravy, as in skiing or snowboarding. Paddleboards.
Do not go there. You will not like it. Nobody cool goes there.
The water is too cold for you as are the cones at Harbor Freeze or whatever it's called now; the people are mostly Liberals; everybody drives a Subaru with Obama stickers; the lobsters will snap at you; the air is way too pine-scented and salty; it's not fancy enough; you don't have to select your clothing; nobody has a hot tub; there are no swimming pools; it's cool and rainy sometimes and you need a sweater at night and you will get sunburned on the nice days; all the good food is just shellfish and fish; the beaches are too big and the ponds are too deep and dark; there are too many little kids in the restaurants; socialites, investment bankers, and politicians never go there; the blueberry-corn meal pancakes are terrible and the Portuguese seafood stews are terrible; the joint at Cahoon's Hollow is like totally bourgeois and their drinks are too big; there is too much surf on the ocean beaches not to mention the annoying seals; sea gulls and herons crap on your windshield; all the good walks are too long; you have to slam on the brakes for Box Turtles crossing the roads; you will get covered with mud digging your own clams and collecting your own oysters, and you will slice up your hands opening them; etc., etc.
Worse still, with the rapid rise of the oceans due to your car, it will soon be underwater (maybe in 3000 years). So don't buy out there. It's a big, temporary sandbar left over from the last Ice Age.
...as Eddie Palmieri told him, “You used Jewish musicians or you didn’t have a band!” And Tito Puente played bar mitzvahs....A bandleader and multi-instrumentalist, Harlow was referred to by the New York Times as “one of the most important figures in the history of salsa.”...
While in college, I bartendered at Brooklyn's St. George Hotel during huge Puerto Rican dance concerts (sweet smoke billowing from the bathrooms), listened to Puerto Rican music on the radio while cramming, and was fluent enough in Spanish to work in a store in a neighborhood with a large Puerto Rican population (rapid fire Spanish). Funny, they didn't look Jewish! -- BTW, Puerto Rican stew is the best, with tropical ingredients. Try it, you'll like it. Ess up.
We have mentioned many times here that actively-managed investment funds and accounts, after fees, perform worse than index funds.
Fund managers naturally hate that fact, as do investors for whom hope often conquers experience. You cannot dispute the facts: Active Fund Management Is A Loser's Game.
Despite the data, I often think that people want to know that there is a sober person behind the wheel, somebody you can phone when you want to. Somebody who cares. Somebody who is smarter than the markets. They pay for that fantasy.
How to protect your nest egg in the Land of ZIRP? Don't ask me. I bank 10% of my pre-tax income each year, religiously. My nest egg, paltry as it is, is 1/4 equity index funds, 1/4 bond index funds, 1/4 cash, and 1/4 in one really good hedge fund. It may all blow up someday, but I intend to never need the money anyway. The men in my family never quit working and I will keep that wholesome, old-fashioned tradition going unless or until disease or the grim reaper get me.
Retirement ages people, or most people. It ages them, mentally.
I think it is an old New Englander ethic: be stingy, save, resist temptations to buy stuff, and work forever. Use money for overpriced education, books, booze, theater, adventure, and travel.
...you’ve been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped. Yes, capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed you, fed you, wiped your mouth, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught you, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counseled you, encouraged you, consoled you and encouraged you again. You’ve been nudged, cajoled, wheedled and implored. You’ve been feted and fawned over and called sweetie pie. Yes, you have. And, certainly, we’ve been to your games, your plays, your recitals, your science fairs. Absolutely, smiles ignite when you walk into a room, and hundreds gasp with delight at your every tweet. Why, maybe you’ve even had your picture in the Townsman! And now you’ve conquered high school... and, indisputably, here we all have gathered for you, the pride and joy of this fine community, the first to emerge from that magnificent new building...
But do not get the idea you’re anything special. Because you’re not.
There is nothing easy about leading an "ordinary" life - whatever that is - and you will always be precious to your parents.
...the single-mother revolution has left us with the following reality. At the top of the social order is a positive feedback loop, with kids raised in stable, high-investment, and relatively affluent homes going to college, finding similar mates, and raising their own children in stable, high-investment, and relatively affluent homes. At the bottom is a negative feedback loop, with kids raised by single mothers in unstable, low-investment homes finding themselves unable to adapt to today’s economy and going on to create more unstable, single-mother homes.
Not only do we have more poverty, inequality, and immobility; we have the makings of a caste society, with an inherited elite and an entrenched proletariat. That’s not an America that anyone finds very attractive.
Raising kids as a single parent is something that only extraordinary people can do well.
Harvard's Michael Sandel is a rock star political/moral philosopher. I've never read him. All I know about him is from this review of his new book, What Money Can't Buy, in The Guardian.
So just a brief thought about the article, not the book. It seems to me as if Sandel has created a straw man of money - or maybe of markets, and wishes people would consider more elevated, more moral views of life.
But don't markets simply reflect what people want, and the decisions and choices people make? Many people seem to want to buy his ideas, which is why his book is making him big bucks in the marketplace of the bookstores.
Sandel makes the illuminating observation that what he calls the "market triumphalism" in western politics over the past 30 years has coincided with a "moral vacancy" at the heart of public discourse, which has been reduced in the media to meaningless shouting matches on cable TV – what might be called the Foxification of debate – and among elected politicians to disagreements so technocratic and timid that citizens despair of politics ever addressing the questions that matter most.
"There is an internal connection between the two, and the internal connection has to do with this flight from judgment in public discourse, or the aspiration to value neutrality in public discourse. And it's connected to the way economics has cast itself as a value-neutral science when, in fact, it should probably be seen – as it once was – as a branch of moral and political philosophy."
"Illuminating observation"? That's new?
It may be true that profs of Economics have attempted to make their area of study as value-neutral as physics, but economics as practiced by the individual person in a free society is as far from value-neutral as can be. After all, there are "markets" in values and morals too and everybody seeks different versions of these products.
Free markets in everything, from ideas, to religion, to dating, to education, to health, to business. That's America to me. Just don't expect me to approve of your choices.
Help me out, gentle readers. What contradictions can you see in Sandel, as seen through the article?
While leaning against a wall sweating after my heroic aerobics the other day, at 5:45 AM, I decided to interview a sweet little (but muscular and fit) trainer about some details on the roughly 60 people who show up when the doors open at 5.
She told me that it is not the same people every day, but it tends to break down like this:
- around 1/3 are Moms who do an early work-out before going home to make breakfast for their kids (while Dad is still home and the kids are sleeping). She said this early-bird approach is increasingly popular with Moms around here, where men typically leave for work at 6 or 6:30. - most of the rest of the folks, 50-50 men and gals - are there before work, with their dress clothes with them on hangers
Plus
- about 7-10 muscular hunks doing weight training - mostly guys but always a couple of gals - and usually an "anorectic or two" on the treadmills
Despite the cultural storms and waves, it it is the daunting job of royalty (or at least of Brit royalty who are currently, sort-of of German origin despite being Brit in culture and manner) to make the best stand for the core values of duty and service.
I have never met the Queen, but I have always liked the cut of her jib.
The Queen of Duty - In an era of irresponsibility, Elizabeth Regina always does what is expected of her.
In 1911, the poet-philosopher T. E. Hulme observed that “there must be one word in the language spelt in capital letters. For a long time, and still for sane people, the word was God. Then one became bored with the letter ‘G,’ and went on to ‘R,’ and for a hundred years it was Reason, and now all the best people take off their hats and lower their voices when they speak of Life.” I think Hulme was on to something, both in his observation about the inveterate habit of reverence and the choice that sanity dictates. I wonder, though, whether we as a culture haven’t shifted our attention from “L” for “Life” to “E” for “Egalitarianism” or “P” for “Political Correctness.”
It is noteworthy, in any event, to what extent certain key words live in a state of existential diminishment. Consider the word “Gentleman.” It was not so long ago that it named a critical moral-social-cultural aspiration. What happened to the phenomenon it named? Or think of the word “respectable.” It too has become what the philosopher David Stove called a “smile word,” that is, a word that names a forgotten or neglected or out-of-fashion social virtue that we might remember but no longer publicly practice. The word still exists, but the reality has been ironized out of serious discussion. It is hard to use straight. Just as it would be difficult to call someone “respectable” today without silently adding a dollop of irony, so it is with the word “gentleman.”
Read it all. There is all sorts of good stuff in it.
We attended a delightful Jubilee party that some Brit friends threw yesterday. Jolly good fun. Buckets of Pimm's Cup. Our friends were also celebrating their achievement of American citizenship, about which they feel proud. There are tight citizenship quotas for northern European immigrants despite our friends' being a Cambridge-educated economist and mathematician. I think he has waited ten years, working with a green card. Their house was flying both Brit and American flags for the occasion.
One of a bunch of cool pics from the year of the Queen's coronation (h/t AVI). What are those bags hanging on the wall?
I considered asking readers what crimes they may have committed, but figured few would respond despite the fact that we all have made dumb mistakes. (See 
Like a cross between a kayak and a surfboard. Probably invented by cavemen on logs, but new again.
We have mentioned many times here that actively-managed investment funds and accounts, after fees, perform worse than index funds.
My Mom, an avid gardener and an avid reader, recommends Richard Mabey's