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.
The distinguished publisher of The Rumford Meteor has gone Hunter Thompson, or Carl Hiassen, or Rupert Murdoch, or The Onion, or something like that.
If Maine is Lake Wobegon on meth and welfare, this online newspaper captures the local ambience with, dare I say it, wit and wisdom.
Not only that, it's all pure fact. No wonder everybody in the Statehouse in Augusta (where's that?) reads it. And if Maine has any remaining local journalists, I'm sure they read it too.
It's a slice of America, and Mr. Sullivan has, I think rightly, recognized that colorful local online news is part of the future of journalism as the dead tree approach dies its slow death. Only problem: do people in Maine have internets?
How does one market a new online local (ie statewide) newspaper? Rent a billboard? Where?
Academia seems torn between utter decadence and Spanish Inquisition-like puritanism. Peter Wood discusses Higher Sex Ed:
Educate about “sexual harassment and sexual violence” on one hand, and promote sexual license and vulgarity on the other hand? This may not be a complete contradiction, but it is pretty close to one. License and restraint are awkward partners. Campus culture currently decrees that we should want both: It decrees that we should strive to liberate students from conventional morality in favor of free-wheeling sexual expression, while at same time we should instill an ethic of male restraint hedged by severe penalties.
Containing one's sexual and romantic impulses is one of the more difficult things that adult humans are called upon to do in civilized life. Academia reflects that human challenge in warning guys never to touch a girl on their way to their exciting Porn and Perversion Studies class.
Dalio is predicting that heavily indebted countries, including the US, will have to print money to deal with their debts, leading to a collapse in their currency and bond markets, and that late 2012 and 2013 will be another very difficult period. So be warned.
"Another difficult period"? What about now? He is usually right about things, it would seem. He is telling us that he is betting on that.
Trying to organize my personal photo philes, and finding fun trip pics. Riche in life but not in money, unlike the Duc de Berry who got to live off his peasants... Screw the money. Carpe diem. That's the modern way. Put it on a credit card. Obama will pay it.
My family skis. My kids are wonderful skiers, but I just alternate between reckless and timid, and have accumulated a couple of permanent ski injuries. Glad to have them, in a way, though. It's worth it for the cheap expensive thrills.
These folks want white people exterminated (h/t Moonbattery.) That's downright mean - and not multi-cultural at all.
Given the hardships and injustices of their slave ancestors, American descendants of Africans should thank their lucky stars that they ended up being born in America instead of the violent, corrupt, crappy AIDS-ridden place that most of Africa is today. Heck, I am grateful that my ancestors were driven away from England by government edicts, and England isn't all that bad even though it's getting worse and worse.
The following excerpts will give you a taste of the book:
Coffee: "For the most part, white people love Starbucks, although they will profess to hate how the chain is now a multi international corporation."
Organic food: "Because of the balance of global wealth and power, there is a general assumption that white people are pretty shrewd. And for the most part, history has proven this to be true. But white people have one great weakness: organic food."
Having black friends: "...an abundance of black friends (defined in white culture as two) also enables a white person to be the resident expert on African-American issues when there are no black people around."
Multilingual child: All white people their children to speak another language. There are no exceptions."
Dinner Parties: Outside of dictatorships and a few murder trials, there might not be a more rigorous judgement process in the modern world."
I love that the bio on the back cover includes the fact that he is a Ph.D dropout.
If you were born pinkish and peruse that book, you will realize how much of your life is a cultural cliche. Ouch. (Sorry - forgot how to write an accent aigue)
And if such racist white-haters have one drop of "diversity" in their hearts, they might benefit from Brookhiser's classic The Way of the Wasp. We WASPs need understanding, tolerance, and acceptance just like everybody else. We're a minority, ya know. Or almost one. Most of my ancestors were serfs, but serfdom and service to the State and the Lords is not my cup of meat.
Honestly, I am so sick of race. It is just plain stupid. I am part American Indian. Nobody cares about race anymore except the race-mongers and the race-hustlers and college admissions offices. It's pathetic.
Anyway, between those two cultural treatises I linked, those angry black people would discover that white folks lead lives of cliche at least as much as they do themselves. Sheesh. I thought racial hatred and anger were out of fashion in the Obama era.
Last year, at the invitation of Family Security Matters, I penned a reflection on 9/11 that focused on my experience with the first 10-years of my son’s life, 9/11 With My Son. This year I told the editor I had nothing to add. However, I do, but rather from others.
My son Jason, now 11, has the habit of taking a subject that interests him and applying himself to becoming the world’s greatest expert. He did that with the Titanic, and then the Harry Potter series, and now with 9/11. The underlying theme seems to be the magnitude of the events and their impacts. The sinking of the Titanic belied the security of technology in the face of a natural iceberg. The unfolding of Harry Potter’s adventures belied the safe childhood we parents struggle to create as children face supernatural evil. 9/11 combines these elements. 9/11 belies the security that we thought insulated America from the bloodthirsty hatred rising to pure evil that we thought only happened remotely in a disconnected elsewhere.
Several prominent blogs have featured links to an essay in the New York Times by Edward Rothstein, Amid the Memorials, Ambiguity and Ambivalence. Instead of our media and the cultural elites it celebrates being confused or even searching for American guilt, Rothstein suggests, “a Sept. 11 commemoration might well be a celebration of democratic culture’s enduring presence.” John Podhoretz at Commentary’s Contentions blog calls Rothstein’s essay, “The most important essay you’re likely to read this week,” for its critique of “the conversion of 9/11 from an act of wanton destruction and murder to a moment requiring an examination of our own sins.”
Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion, celebrates its 30th anniversary by offering an essay that delves deeper that Rothstein’s restricted newspaper word count. In this, Roger Kimball’s New Criterion exhibits its unique value. As Roger Kimball writes in his introductionto the 30th Anniversary Issue,
We have endeavored to provide a home for vigorously written cultural criticism while also building an institution of critical dissent. The two go together. At a time when culture and intellectual life are everywhere beholden to the imperatives of political correctness, even insisting on clear prose seems a daring provocation….Similarly, simply telling the truth about a whole host of controversial subjects is regarded as a challenge to the reigning pieties of established opinion.
Michael Lewis leads off the New Criterion September issue with America resumed: 9/11 remembered, The first entry in its series "Future tense: the lessons of culture in an age of upheaval." Lewis explores the whys behind the cultural confusion that Rothstein highlights. One must, must, read it all, for its exploration of how America’s arts have failed to capture the transformative lessons of 9/11. Some excerpts:
[T]he most vital cultural legacy of any war—or any great national trauma, for that matter—is intangible. It is the comprehensive way it changes our shared attitudes and assumptions, our collective sensibility. Changes in the collective sensibility, being invisible, usually do not reveal themselves until they are expressed in action…. Questions of art and culture seldom are directly involved in a national trauma; they belong to the shadow realm in which great events are digested and replayed after the fact, much as a dream imaginatively rehearses the happenings of the day….
Admittedly, the September 11 Memorial helps give focus and voice to the nation’s sorrow. But sorrow is only one tone in the spacious emotional register of a nation, and there are others, such as resolution, defiance, and even fury, that at certain times might be more appropriate. A person who could grieve but not snarl or even bite would be a strangely limited creature, and the same is true of a nation. Yet, after September 11, the public was given copious outlets only for its sorrow and none at all for its fury. (One must make the necessary exception for country and western music.).
When it came to addressing the harder and more fiery sentiments of the public, the cultural apparatus acted as bridle rather than spur, and rather nervously at that. Anything that might serve to focus national rage, such as showing films of the burning towers and plunging victims, was swept from the airwaves after a few days, only to be shown in short, carefully edited passages during the occasional anniversary broadcast or documentary. This was rationalized as a measure to spare bereft family members further grief, but it is much more the sense that such imagery was deemed incendiary, and likely to stoke the flames of public wrath, as if the most urgent danger—and the only danger—facing America was the prospect of mass mob violence against American Muslims….
The buildings and institutions that were targeted on that day were chosen as symbols of American national identity; those who were murdered were not collateral casualties but were killed in their capacity as Americans. The entire framework of the attack was a deliberate and focused assault on those objects that stood for the American government and American capitalism… But if the context of the event was explicitly American, this was precisely the terrain on which the arbiters of American culture—at least a substantial faction—felt themselves uneasy. Feelings of national solidarity, the sense of personal participation in the fate of one’s nation-state, have so long been disparaged as jingoism that even those artists who felt unaccountable patriotic stirrings found themselves utterly unable to make artistic use of them.
When one comes eyeball to eyeball with a shocking and malignant truth, but is unable to speak frankly and openly about it because of a taboo, one must resort to distortion, evasion, and self-deception….
Yet another lesson of culture after September 11 is that one must not fret or mope. This is hardly the first time that a sizable branch of the cultural establishment has failed to draw the appropriate lessons from new events. Yesterday’s radicals become today’s purveyors of the conventional wisdom and tomorrow’s sclerotic academicians….
Those revelations, administered in the most brutal manner conceivable, have reshaped the collective consciousness of the nation. But they have done so with very little help from art, which through the ages has been the most effective instrument for focusing the cultural consciousness, for framing its questions and concerns in the lucid terms without which no national conversation is possible…. But it is also because of a taboo, imposed gradually and imperceptibly over the past few decades, about expressing strong emotions in national terms—other than that of grief. This offers more concern, for a culture that cannot express, and make sense out of, the longings and passions of the people that sustains that culture cannot remain vital….
Last year, my son Jason offered this comment on what he’s learned from 9/11: “I’m glad the US has people who will fight so another 9/11 or worse doesn’t happen again.” This year, Jason adds: “There are heroes who help others escape. There are greater heroes who rise up regardless of dangers, as the police and firefighters did in the Towers.” Jason adds, "Screw al-Quaida." My son watches and listens to all the cultural detritus on TV and radio. Despite the best worst efforts of the profiting cretins he is exposed to, my son Jason’s quest to understand the facts of disasters and the best of people has independently led him to the conclusions that Rothstein and Lewis bemoan our cultural elites avoiding.
As long as there are Americans growing up like my son, and those like Rothstein, Kimball and Lewis helping to straighten out the confusions of their parents, our fears may be overblown and our hopes encouraged.
1950: Your honor, the defendant just snapped and killed three people. 2010: Your honor, I'm innocent, I just snapped and killed three people.
I'm hard-pressed to come up with any segment of the population that doesn't have a pre-medieval answer ready to be trotted out, at flight-deck-McGlaughlin Group volume, for any social ill or misbehavior, and a ready-made template to call any productive behavior a crime, too. There's isn't a dime's bit of difference between Pat Robertson or Al Gore in these matters. (A)Gay people or (B)Ford Explorers cause hurricanes. Take your pick, but there's no (C)
Our ignorance is truly staggering. According to some estimates, 95 percent of organisms in the soil alone are unknown to science. Many of them labor unseen, in the dark, serving as the churning stomachs of our planet, digesting dead plants and animals and, in the process, enriching the earth we depend upon for food and fiber. Other organisms expel their gaseous waste — a precious resource known as oxygen —to create the atmosphere that supports and sweetens the earth with such glorious creatures as toucans and manta rays and blue morpho butterflies, not to mention writers and academics. Some bacteria are even thought to contribute to the formation of clouds.
And from New Scientist, A field guide to bullshit: How do people defend their beliefs in bizarre conspiracy theories or the power of crystals? Philosopher Stephen Law has tips for spotting their strategies -
Perhaps the 21st century will "belong to China and India", as many suggest. But the US has been written off many times before. The global industries that have done well in the past decade - particularly those in the digital economy - seem to reward risk-takers, iconoclasts and creative thinkers. For better or worse, the US is better known for those qualities than the likes of China or Germany.
However, CAP alone receives $25 million per annum, so in just two years it is in receipt of far more money than all of the “Islamophobic” groups it collectively names and condemns have made in a decade. As a 501 (3)(c) organization, CAP’s existence seems to be entirely connected to attempting to swing elections in the Democrat Party’s favor, which would appear to be a contravention of IRS guidelines.
The “originality” of claiming there is lucrative money to be made from confronting Islamism is already a stale cliché.
Being a lifelong critic of Islam, red flags popped up in my head at his purported cozy relationship with Islam and prompted me to look very closely at the governor’s record on this particular issue and at this specific time….Unless someone can come up with solid evidence to the contrary, I feel relieved that Governor Perry is not an Islamophile, he is not even an Islamic apologist, and he can be entrusted with the responsibility of guarding our nation’s priceless heritage of liberty against the assaults of Islamic fascism.
Liberal elites like Keller are haunted by the specter of right-wing theocracy. When they see Christian conservatives on the campaign trail, they envision inquisitions and witch hunts and the suppression of liberty. They dread the prospect of a president respecting any "authority higher than the Constitution," and regard ardent religious faith as the equivalent of belief in space aliens.
“We can be saved only by fighting,” Hitler told leaders of the armed forces in February of 1933. Normal rules of diplomacy saw as their ultimate aim the avoidance of conflict and the settlement of international disputes by negotiation. Hitler did not play by these rules, though he repeatedly tried to publicly reassure people that he intended to do so. It took other European statesmen a very long time to realize this. Their misjudgments form the heart of this important book.
…The best chance of success was now, before Germany’s enemies were fully prepared. And so began the greatest war in history, a war that was to last until 1945, a war in which more than 50 million people would lose their lives, a war that would end in the destruction of Germany and the collapse of the European overseas empires…
In the latest upset, four federal agencies known as the Interagency Working Group (IWG) have delivered a plan to drastically censor food advertisers with products deemed to be “too high” in sodium, sugar, or fat that cater to any viewing audience between the ages of two and 11….It’s not just Twinkies and cookies that will be affected, either. Anything deemed to have a little too much sodium or fat will be tested under the new rules, including foods whose very production requires a high sodium content (like pickles) and those that are naturally high fat (like peanuts). As Katz wrote, “Nutritional staples such as Cheerios, peanut butter, and yogurt are verboten under the proposed standards, which effectively constitute a government-regulated grocery list.”
Unions Try To Dis-invent Success for Poor Minority Students:
Only 11% of likely voters think government should invent income for the poor
President Obama doubles-down on inventing prosperity through Big Government-Big Business collusion
What have we learned about inventing prosperity in 2066 years?
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) “The budget must be balanced, the Treasury must be refilled, public debt must be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom must be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands must be curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” – Cicero, 55 B.C.
While Bastiat agrees that repairing broken windows is a good thing, encouraging the glazier's trade and income, he argues that it is quite different from the idea that breaking windows is a good thing, in that it would cause money to circulate and encourage industry in general. Why? Because a shopkeeper who spends money to fix broken windows cannot spend or invest that money on new ventures.
Obama Not Ready For Prime time : "Obama looks small. It was a juvenile move for a President to make and it shows he has a poor understanding of how to use the power of the presidency." + TV Speech by a Zombie:
In the last 2 1/2 years, we’ve had over 200 presidential talks about jobs, and now there’s going to be yet another one. It’s not just an ordinary one, but another giant showpiece, a speech to a joint session of Congress, and coincidentally at the same time as a previously scheduled GOP presidential debate. Congress is probably going to be told, as it has been over the last 2 1/2 years, that failure to enact this, that, or the other thing is irresponsible and inexcusable. But according to reports, there’s nothing new in the speech, certainly nothing that could be effective. Moreover, this latest rehash of same-old, same-old comes from a guy with support from Independents in the 30′s and whom over one in four Democrats want replaced as the top of the 2012 ticket. Even with the media carrying this guy’s water, we can’t see how this is anything other than a formula for electoral catastrophe. If you disagree, educate us please.
This “In” button will be distributed to all those who view his speech:
Zombie capitalism: No, You Can't Invest Like Warren Buffett: His Bank of America deal is a bargain no ordinary investor could get.
Zombie Terrorism: Abdul Hakiim converted to Islam, wore long robes, dreamed of paradise; He was arrested in July for trying to enter Britain with bomb-making guides and al-Qaida propaganda. "But his motivations remain a mystery"
Zombie Riot at amusement park over 'no hijab' rule
Zombie Love: The Rashid Khalidi whose tape with Barack Obama the Los Angeles Times refuses to release, has this to say about fellow zombie Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. going on a trip to Israel.
So, the vice president goes to China—and if that sounds like the beginning of a bad comedy routine, it’s because our current vice president has made it one. The man is a walking pratfall, a clown of the tongue-tied, stumbling kind, and only the media’s determined effort to shield the Obama administration from laughter has kept Joe Biden’s miscues, misunderstandings, and mispronouncements from becoming our long-running national joke.
[In] the state of Texas, we’ve created an economy here that leads the nation in job creation…What’s dumb is to oversee an economy that has lost that many millions of jobs, to put unemployment numbers over his four years will stay probably at 9 percent, to downgrade the credit of this good country, to put fiscal policies in place that were a disaster in the ‘30s and try them again in the 2000s – that’s what I consider to be the definition of dumb.
That tropical storm up here dumped the river into my pool, filled it with mud, plants, and frogs, and knocked down a fence. I think VT got the worst of it all.
What books are you reading right now?
No cheating. Don't tell us that you are reading Kant.
I am reading the new Mark Twain autobiography, but you cannot really read it. You just dip into it. He was a charming fellow.
Reno at First Things looked at the life of Moses from an interesting angle: the multicultural man turned uni-cultural by the hand of God. A quote:
Each of us must struggle to understand how to live our lives in a pluralistic, democratic society. But to my mind, however fuzzy and uncertain we might be about any particular public policy or social project, we must at least be clear about Moses. We should want to follow his trajectory, and there can be no compromise with those who prize his multicultural youth. For he who is not a servant of a cultural authority deeply installed is merely human�which is to say, a slave to his passions and servant of his self-interest, who, when he comes to realize his base existence, is all too easily victim of thin, ideological deities who promise the immediate psychological satisfactions of a veneer of moral idealism.
I hope I am not boring my readers with all of my posts about the college bubble and the meaninglessness of the current American college degree. From The Case Against the College Degree:
College degrees are poor proof of learning, and perhaps a barrier to it
Students want jobs and respect. Degrees bring both. Employers, meanwhile, want smart, capable workers. A degree is a decent enough proxy for intelligence, but we want it to be more than that. We want degrees to mean that students have learned the foundations of human knowledge literature, chemistry, physics, composition, metaphysics, psychology, economics and so on. If we didn t, we d replace degrees with inexpensive vocational exams.
Charles Murray, a fellow at American Enterprise Institute, calls for just that in a recent book, Real Education. He argues that too many kids who lack the ability to complete a liberal arts education are being pushed into four-year liberal arts schools, because there s a steep societal penalty for not getting a degree. Schools, in turn, have made their degree programs easier. Murray provides a sample of courses that students used to fulfill core degree requirements at major universities in 2004, including History of Comic Book Art (Indiana University), History and Philosophy of Dress (Texas Tech University) and Campus Culture and Drinking (Duke). He documents not only falling standards but rampant grade inflation.
Read the whole thing. He has an interesting suggestion too, but colleges won't go for it. For their own survival, they are committed to their marketing of their expensive credential, whether it means anything or not. In my experience over recent years, it means little-to-nothing.
You used to know what assumptions you could make about somebody with a BA. Not any more. Now, they don't even need to know basic calculus. That's crazy.
A farmer stopped by the local mechanic's shop to have his truck fixed. They couldn't do it while he waited, so he said he didn't live far and would walk home.
On the way home he stopped at the hardware store and bought a bucket and a gallon of paint. He then stopped by the feed store and picked up a couple of chickens and agoose. However, struggling outside the store he now had a problem - how to carry his entire purchases home.
While he was scratching his head he was approached by a little old lady who told him she was lost. She asked 'can you tell me how to get to1603 Mockingbird Lane?'
The farmer said, 'Well, as a matter of fact, my farm is very close to that house. I would walk you there but I can't carry this lot.'
The old lady suggested, 'Why don't you put the can of paint in the bucket. Carry the bucket in one hand, put a chicken under each arm and carry the goose in the other hand?'
'Why thank you very much,' he said and proceeded to walk the old girl home.On the way he says 'Lets take my short cut and go down this alley. We'll be there in no time.'
The little old lady looked over cautiously then said, 'I am a lonely widow without a husband to defend me ... 'How do I know that when we get in the alley you won't hold me up against the wall, pull my skirt, and have your way with me?'
The farmer said, 'Holy smokes lady! I'm carrying a bucket, a gallon of paint, two chickens and a goose. How in the hell could I possibly hold you up against the wall and do that?'
The old lady replied, 'Set the goose down, cover him with the bucket, put the paint on top of the bucket, and I'll hold the chickens.'
Why is a college degree diminishing in its economic and social value?
Because so many people are going, nowadays. It's not special anymore, and unselected people are getting degrees today who could not have gotten near higher ed one generation ago. It's a consumer-oriented biz now, desperate for gullible consumers. From our IBD link this morning:
A recent example of this exaggerated view of the value of higher education is "The Undereducated American," a paper by Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce.
The authors argue that the United States needs to produce far more college graduates than it currently does.
Their evidence is that there is a significant wage "premium" for those who graduate from college — across all fields of work. They argue, in effect, that the high return on investment applies regardless of whether the graduate becomes a financier or a dishwasher.
But they fail to look at generational differences.
Recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau reveal that gains for recent college graduates have been declining for more than 10 years.
Let the dead French theorists lie. Instead, literary scholars can become guides to the physical reality of the past. If you think about it, that's what we've been doing in class for the last hundred years: explaining how to pronounce "Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?" in Early Modern English, for instance, or describing a Boeing B-17 to help students understand Randall Jarrell's poem "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Once ordinary people note that we're doing something useful again, they might stop looking at us like we're nuts. And maybe we'll even get some jobs back.
Are the kids so uninformed that they don't know who a ball turret gunner is? Wish I had time now to discuss this essay, but I don't.
I say that it can be either, both, or neither. If one grows up in a drug- and crime-tolerant environment, it's more likely that the wicked side of one's nature will be given free rein and things won't work out well, just as it's easier to live like a Boy Scout when all around you are doing the same.
My problem with addressing the subject this way, however, is that it ignores the large numbers of voluntarily poor, unluckily poor, and temporarily poor. Poverty is not a unitary phenomenon. Is a struggling artist or actor "poor"? And what is poverty in America anyway?
I think that French may be speaking more about "the poor in spirit" than the materially-deprived.
Lewis’s aversion to government was clearly revealed in 1951 when Winston Churchill, within weeks after he regained office as prime minister of Great Britain, wrote to Lewis offering to have him knighted as “Commander of the Order of the British Empire.”Lewis flatly declined the honor because he, unlike the “progressives,” was never interested in politics and was deeply skeptical of government power and politicians, as expressed in the first two lines of his poem “Lines during a General Election”: “Their threats are terrible enough, but we could bear / All that; it is their promises that bring despair.”
I think one of the things that defines our website, Maggie's Farm, is curiosity. Curiosity about almost everything. We are only adequate writers; we lack creative flair and a zippy way with language; we rarely present entirely new ideas about things (but sometimes we do); we are dilettantes in most areas we discuss.
Curiosity is us. We like to wonder what is inside things.
As I sit by the pool this lovely Connecticut afternoon sipping a Scotch and enjoying a decent ceegar after having done a mile in the pool nude nekked with only God and the wife's horses watching me, I have been reading this in American Scientist: That’s Interesting - Curiosity drives discovery. But what, exactly, makes us curious? One quote:
Faced with a puzzle, and excited by it, I do try to understand the anomaly before me. My failure to find a ready explanation, and my feeling that the phenomenon is nonetheless understandable—these are both motivating psychological actions. In time, if I am fortunate, my thinking brings me to an explanation that makes sense not only to me, but to the community of chemists. I wouldn’t have gotten there without thinking, “That molecule is really interesting.”
Three things drive learning: curiosity, ambition for mastery, and necessity. Curiosity is an underrated and relatively rare gift. We try to nurture it in ourselves.
A commenter here mentioned C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man recently. It got me thinking about what the most influential books have been for my adult thinking about socio-religio-political topics.
I'm sure I omitted quite a few, but these came to mind. (I guess, as an ole Yankee, I am rather freedom-oriented and leave-me-alone-oriented rather than gimme-oriented. I was raised to fend for myself and to shoot my own moose, but that might be old-fashioned nowadays. The "modern" women, apparently, want government to be their help and support in life instead of husbands. That's pathetic - on both sides.)
When I think about writings that influence me, I wonder whether they indeed influence, or whether they articulate half-thought and semi-formed thoughts that were already brewing in the back of my brain from my life experience.
In an ironic conclusion, Lewis predicts that what will be hailed an man's ultimate victory over Nature (such as human cloning?) will actually be Nature's ultimate victory over man. This will occur when we can fully control the kind of people the next generation will be (i.e., how they think), but in the absence of moral standards, this choice will be made arbitrarily; that is, according to purely Natural impulses - thus we have the Abolition of Man as man and the ascendancy of man as animal.
Feel welcome to add your personal list to the comments.
Why aren't guys growing up these days? Or did guys ever really want go grow up? I don't know. A sociologist named Michael Kimmel has a book out reporting on his new study. For example, meet Jason:
Jason graduated from Dartmouth almost five years ago. Now 26, he works in finance in Boston and shares a Back Bay apartment with five other guys with whom he went to school. He runs and works out, stays fit, and dates lots of different women all in their early twenties. At night, he hangs out at the Dartmouth bars of Boston. Hey, college was supposed to be the best years of your life, right? he explains, with only a trace of defensiveness in his voice. So where is it written that it has to end when you graduate? College is forever, man. That's what the admissions guys say that these will be your friends forever. Well, forever is now.
We posted earlier on our side trip by train into Lombardy and Lake Como, via Milan, and our visit to Villa Carlotta. This area was historically famous for its silk (which Smithsonian Magazinefeatured this month), its picturesque villages, and for its villas and gardens. Today, we will finish that day's journey up with a bit of Como and Bellagio. Some consider Bellagio the most lovely town in Europe, but I think it has tons of competition for that title.
Here's my shot of a view of Lake Como from Villa Melzi (built around 1808) in Bellagio:
Actual writings from hospital patient charts (medical transcription people are not perfect, nor is docs' handwriting):
1. The patient refused autopsy. 2. The patient has no previous history of suicides. 3. Patient has left white blood cells at another hospital. 4. She has no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband states she was very hot in bed last night. 5. Patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year. 6. On the second day the knee was better, and on the third day it disappeared. 7. The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to be depressed. 8. The patient has been depressed since she began seeing me in 1993. 9. Discharge status: Alive but without permission. 10. Healthy appearing decrepit 69-year old male, mentally alert but forgetful. 11. Patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch. 12. She is numb from her toes down. 13. While in ER, she was examined, x-rated and sent home. 14. The skin was moist and dry. 15. Occasional, constant infrequent headaches. 16. Patient was alert and unresponsive. 17. Rectal examination revealed a normal size thyroid. 18. She stated that she had been constipated for most of her life, until she got a divorce. 19. I saw your patient today, who is still under our car for physical therapy. 20. Both breasts are equal and reactive to light and accommodation. 21. Examination of genitalia reveals that he is circus sized. 22. The lab test indicated abnormal lover function. 23. Skin: somewhat pale but present. 24. The pelvic exam will be done later on the floor. 25. Patient has two teenage children, but no other abnormalities.
Got a car or truck with a sticky ignition, where the key won't turn even if you wiggle the steering wheel and move the key in and out a little bit, or turn the key in the opposite direction to loosen things up? Or, worse, the key doesn't want to come out?
It can be exasperating and, at times, embarassing. Apparently it can be due to slightly jammed lock cylinders, or the wheel lock.
Some suggest a squirt of WD-40 into the lock but I am wary about doing that. I wonder whether any of our car mechanic genius readers have any ideas, short of an expensive trip to the auto shop.
Academia seems torn between utter decadence and Spanish Inquisition-like puritanism. Peter Wood discusses 
Ray Dalio, the quiet, reclusive, distinctly unflashy, and jazz- and opera-loving founder of 
Those folks who want to exterminate my pale, mottled, and unwholesome skin tone need to learn more about us, and try to understand us better. Empathy, understanding, all that good stuff. Here's a start: 
Reno at First Things looked at the life of Moses from an interesting angle: the multicultural man turned uni-cultural by the hand of God. A quote:
I hope I am not boring my readers with all of my posts about the college bubble and the meaninglessness of the current American college degree. From 
A farmer stopped by the local mechanic's shop to have his truck fixed. They couldn't do it while he waited, so he said he didn't live far and would walk home.
It's about a Model B Ford engine head, from 
My list would have to include:
Why aren't guys growing up these days? Or did guys ever really want go grow up? I don't know. A sociologist named Michael Kimmel has a book out reporting on his new study. For example, meet Jason: