Maggie's FarmWe 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. |
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Thursday, April 9. 2015Bike-riding at nightI think it's generally a bad idea, but I have done it many times including around NYC. A good adventure for sure at night, but daytime is fine. Here's something, but it's the half-drunks and the immigrants in cars that are the problem and I do not think this will have any impact on them because they are too busy jostling cars and dinging pedestrians to worry about bikers:
Wednesday, April 8. 2015Preoccupied with "healthy eating"?There's a name for that: Orthorexia nervosa. It is indeed an eating disorder which is probably related to, and often overlaps, the other eating disorders. Unlike the other eating disorders, it seems harmless enough although irrational, a waste of time, and annoying to others. A waste of effort and money too. Basically another variant of the obsessional neuroses. Vegans, organics, gluten freaks, Whole Foods, and all that silliness. Nobody can define healthy eating and it doesn't matter as far as we can tell. Therefore, if you worry about food we say you just need to get a life. A social life, wholesome hobbies, etc. Unless you need to lose weight for health and vigor, to prevent arthritis and diabetes, etc, that is. Does your cholesterol count matter for anything? Not at all, unless you have the genetic disease of hypercholesterolemia which is detectable early in life. In that case, you take pills, cross your fingers, and pray.
Posted by Dr. Joy Bliss
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16:14
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The End of the UniversityA major essay from a Maggie's hero, Roger Scruton, with a survey of the evolution of the modern university. He begins:
Tuesday, April 7. 2015New England real estate: The Borough of FenwickThe Borough of Fenwick, Old Saybrook, Connecticut. There are hundreds of elitist, WASPy, old private communities like this scattered around the Northeast. Many operate as, or like, private clubs and some are more informal. I know about a lot of them, but have not been to many of them. They tend to be so discreet that you would not know about them. Blooming Grove is great with thousands of acres, several streams and lakes and great old houses, but you have to be related to one of the founders to have a house there. We all live in different realities.
Posted by Bird Dog
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04:48
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Sunday, April 5. 2015Our great art institutions are cheating us of our artistic patrimony every day, and if they wanted to, they could stop.
Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial Michael O'Hare has plenty of complaints about art museums in Museums Can Change—Will They? Our great art institutions are cheating us of our artistic patrimony every day, and if they wanted to, they could stop. Some of his gripes are reasonable, but some are not. Here are some of my points: Museums are not just show places. They are safe repositories. Their stored things are used for sharing with other museums, for special exhibitions, study, etc. Can looking at pictures be brain-deadening? Sure. I call it "museum brain." My limit is one hour, to see some things targeted in advance. It's overstimulating. Are museums sort-of deadly environments? Yes. They are designed to highlight precious stuff in a sterile, non-distracting environment where everybody has access. Access is a good thing. However, little or nothing that one sees at the Met or at the Kunsthistorisches Museum was made for museum viewing. It was all made for a function, or for decor, in non-museum places - public or private. For entertainment, really, whether in church or in secular. Treating pictures as sacred relics in a Church of Art distorts the thing. When you see a single Picasso oil in somebody's living room, it's a different experience and you see it for what it is - totally cool and interesting decor mostly. Related to that, the most comfortable museum I've used is the Belvedere. It is one of the first public art musems in the world. Everything is just hung or placed in the old Hapsburg palace as if it belonged there. Give it a try. The Frick is a bit like that too. It was somebody's house and people can still throw parties, weddings, etc. there with the Fragonards doing what they were meant to do - produce delight.
Posted by Bird Dog
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14:33
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Easter: I think what I need is a hard-boiled eggI love deviled eggs. An egg salad sandwich is good too, with some celery in it, lots of pepper, on white bread. Thanks, Easter Bunny, for laying all those pretty eggs. Easter Eggs for Grown-Up Tastes What does Resurrection mean? Easter and the Cosmic Christ:
It's that gentle knock that can eventually get you out of the chair or sofa, and open the door. That painting hangs in St. Paul's in London. I was surprised to see it there. Saturday, April 4. 2015Brisket is not the same as Corned Beef!For Passover, a friend sent along his reminiscences of growing up Jewish: Brisket is not the same as Corned Beef! Before we start, there are some variations in ingredients because of the various types of Jewish taste (Polack, Litvack, Deutch and Gallicianer). Sephardic is for another time. Just as we Jews have six seasons of the year (winter, spring, summer, autumn, the slack season, and the busy season), we all focus on a main ingredient which, unfortunately and undeservedly, has disappeared from our diet. I’m talking, of course, about SCHMALTZ (chicken fat). SCHMALTZ has, for centuries, been the prime ingredient in almost every Jewish dish, and I feel it’s time to revive it to its rightful place in our homes. (I have plans to distribute it in a green glass Gucci bottle with a label clearly saying: “low fat, no cholesterol, Newman’s Choice, extra virgin SCHMALTZ.” (It can’t miss!) Then there are grebenes – pieces of chicken skin, deep fried in SCHMALTZ, onions and salt until crispy brown (Jewish bacon). This makes a great appetizer for the next cardiologist’s convention. There’s also a nice chicken fricassee (stew) using the heart, gorgle (neck) pipick (gizzard – a great delicacy, given to the favorite child), a fleegle (wing) or two, some ayelech (little premature eggs) and other various chicken innards, in a broth of SCHMALTZ, water, paprika, etc. We also have knishes (filled dough) and the eternal question, “Will that be liver, beef or potatoes, or all three?” Other time-tested favorites are kishkeh, and its poor cousin, helzel (chicken or goose neck). Kishkeh is the gut of the cow, bought by the foot at the Kosher butcher. It is turned inside out, scalded and scraped. One end is sewn up and a mixture of flour, SCHMALTZ, onions, eggs, salt, pepper, etc., is spooned into the open end and squished down until it is full. The other end is sewn and the whole thing is boiled. Often, after boiling, it is browned in the oven so the skin becomes crispy. Yummy! My personal all-time favorite is watching my Zaida (grandpa) munch on boiled chicken feet. For our next course we always had chicken soup with pieces of yellow-white, rubbery chicken skin floating in a greasy sea of lokshen (noodles), farfel (broken bits of matzah), tzibbeles (onions), mondlech (soup nuts), kneidlach (dumplings), kasha (groats), kliskelech and marech (marrow bones) . The main course, as I recall, was either boiled chicken, flanken, kackletten, hockfleish (chopped meat), and sometimes rib steaks, which were served either well done, burned or cremated. Occasionally we had barbecued liver done to a burned and hardened perfection in our own coal furnace. Since we couldn’t have milk with our meat meals, beverages consisted of cheap soda (Kik, Dominion Dry, seltzer in the spritz bottles). In Philadelphia it was usually Franks Black Cherry Wishniak (vishnik). Growing up Jewish - below the fold - Continue reading "Brisket is not the same as Corned Beef!"
Posted by Bird Dog
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13:44
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Friday, April 3. 2015900,000 historic photos of NYC
h/t Open Culture, via Thompson Gosh, I love this crazy city, but sometimes I like to get away from it for a little serenity. Then I get bored, and need to get back. As a country boy, you just need all that stimulation and hustle-bustle. From my reading, it seems that New Amsterdam was more foundational to America than Plymouth ever was. And New Amsterdam was there first, as a speculative project of the Dutch West Indies Company. It was a wild and crazy multicultural tolerant, commercial place in 1623 and they mostly got along with the Indians. It is often omitted from the history that this is where the Pilgrims were headed. Wednesday, April 1. 2015Life in America: Your house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff
Posted by Bird Dog
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16:11
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Panorama MesdagTuesday, March 31. 2015Who is wealthier?
That's from Coyote's We Still Haven't Figured Out How to Measure Prosperity (or poverty, for that matter)
Posted by The News Junkie
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14:28
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When lawmakers don't even know how many laws exist, how can citizens be expected to follow them?
Sunday, March 29. 2015Anglo- American lawThe genius of Anglo-American law and its relationship to individual freedom, property rights, capitalism, contracts, and equality under the law. The above is a section from Alan Macfarlane's excellent, or should I say "magisterial" book, The Invention of the Modern World. A quote from the section:
Posted by The Barrister
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13:15
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Obituary of the YearThe Big Life of Captain Donald Alexander Malcolm Jr., 60: Not the Years in Your Life but the Life in Your Years
Posted by Bird Dog
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07:05
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Saturday, March 28. 2015Breakfast is back - or not
Now that we have finally been informed by our intellectual superiors that a real breakfast is healthier than fattening grains and fattening fruit, a new heresy appears to attack the dietary consensus: Breakfast is not important (unless you are a growing child or do physical labor all day) Of course not. I thrive on coffee for breakfast, maybe with a cigar or some tobacco. A good diner breakfast, much as I love it on the rare occasion, puts me to sleep instead of giving me energy to do things. Friday, March 27. 2015Inequality and Poverty
I see no virtue in economic equalizing. It never worked anywhere, and efforts to impose it by force generally end up with plutocratic, privileged bureaucrats and a nation of serfs serving the State. Why ‘inequality’ can be ‘beautiful’. Furthermore, many people do not base their life choices on money but instead on things more important to them. Related, Socialist Thomas Piketty’s Theory on Income Equality Wrecked by 26-Year-Old MIT Grad Student Poverty in the US? Let's define it first. The US has an extensive safety net able to contain the unfortunate, the feckless, the mentally-ill, the temporarily out of work, etc., etc. We even go overboard with disability, providing for people who could easily do something useful in the world but are working the system. Nobody in the US goes without food, shelter, and a big screen TV if they want those things. Notable also is that US poverty stats do not include any government charity or private charity contributions. Of course, family always helps out first, and that is ignored too. Still, poverty will never go away as long as it is defined as the lowest x% of US income. I am still awaiting the official study which can tell me exactly who "the poor" are in America, and whether they care. NYT: How poor are the poor? Awesome machines
Posted by The News Junkie
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12:23
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Thursday, March 26. 2015When "offence" becomes offense: How we went from "sticks and stones" to the fragile "offence"Insty found this before I did at the esteemable Standpoint: Political Correctness Is Devouring Itself:
The totalitarian impulse is omnipresent, and must be resisted at all times. The "offence principle," however, is nothing but a self-ridiculing bullying tactic which deserves mockery rather that resistance. If you equate offense with a wound, you live on the wrong planet. I am offended by people and things continuously, and that's normal life. But this is not really about emotional wounds - it's a bullying tactic and rarely if ever genuine. Not that that matters anyway. "Offence" becomes offense. Mortality
Posted by Dr. Joy Bliss
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13:46
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Wednesday, March 25. 2015Measuring doctors by the numbers
For another example, cardiac surgeons who are willing to take on the most difficult, or oldest, cases have the worst survival ratings. Of course they do. They are the best at what they do so they take on high-risk cases. That's why No More Numbers makes sense.
Posted by Dr. Joy Bliss
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16:16
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Tuesday, March 24. 2015Wendell Berry, sentimentalistI agree with his sentiments, but times change. Everything is more technological. Farmland Without Farmers - As industrial agriculture replaces men with machines, the American landscape loses its stewards, and the culture they built
Posted by Bird Dog
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16:22
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Monday, March 23. 2015The Gaia Cult"Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths. There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe. . . . There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?"
Posted by Bird Dog
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16:34
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Marriage, social capital, and privilegePeople maximize their advantages, because it produces choices. Choices are good. Everybody has some advantages, talents, gifts. Building social capital is what intact, functional families pursue because it makes life better and more fun for everybody.
Posted by Dr. Joy Bliss
in The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation
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15:17
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Photography Words
Posted by The News Junkie
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14:30
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Sunday, March 22. 2015A saint?I don't know about sainthood, but G K Chesterton (a member of the Maggie's pantheon) certainly deserves to be read and to be remembered.
Posted by The Barrister
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13:44
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