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.
Over the course of quite a few visits to Italy, I have read a good deal about Italian history, art, and architecture. Much of what I learn, I eventually forget unless I use it.
It begins with Medieval, and runs through to late Renaissance in the 1600s. Tons of pictures, and very well-written in almost-scholarly detail. Rich in detail.
The authors blend history with cultural history. A great pleasure to read. And how else would you really know what you are looking at?
Went to the opening of The Steins Collect show at the Met Museum this weekend. It's a large exhibit, lots of interesting stuff but mostly stuff that the Steins (Leo, Gertrude, Michael and Sarah) could afford to buy. I did learn that Gertrude's older brother Leo was really the aesthete in the family, while Gertrude was the one who hogged the limelight.
However, I took notice of some things that I have known, but never attended to, before. Mainly, the attitude and behavior of the museum-goers (place was packed this weekend).
Everybody is hushed, like in church or in a library. People whisper, if they speak at all. Nobody laughs. Nobody talks to strangers. As on NYC sidewalks, eye contact is forbidden. It's a reverent but unfriendly atmosphere.
Nobody looks as if they are having fun, all so somber and serious. When I have my earphones on (I enjoy the audio guides) and end up making some wisecrack comment to Mrs. BD, she frowns and says I am talking too loud. A few times I have made comments to people who were looking at what I was, and they look at me as if I had produced a loud fart in church.
Why is this? I know serious aesthetes are studying the pictures - probably with knowledge and sophistication which far exceed my own - and I agree that Cezanne and Picasso were mind-bogglingly good and inventive at their craft, but their pictures are not objects of worship. Not only not objects of worship, but 20th C art was produced to be commercial - to sell to people to hang on their walls to add interest and enjoyment to their parlors. And to convey to others that you had some avant-garde taste in pictures.
The minute people get outside the museum, they get cheerful and chatty again - like normal people - and finally begin talking about what they have looked at.
Mind you, I agree that it is annoying and uncivilized to be loud, goofy, or boisterous in public spaces (other than in sports venues or the aquarium), but it now strikes me that the reverent hush is really sort of strange and unnatural.
The International Center of Photography is running a retrospective on Weegee, also known as Arthur Fellig, who was known for his stark black and white photos. His story is very inspirational, but most interesting was how he remade himself in the midst of the Depression.
Some economic historians observe that while crises might make it riskier to strike out on one’s own, by depressing pay they also lower the opportunity costs of leaving a job.
Weegee had an eye for the presentation of America's social life. It was generally optimistic, tinged with dark humor. This developed only after he redirected his career as a studio photographer into one following a police radio, and is the portion of his career the retrospective focuses on in "Murder is My Business." As this career path began to fade, Weegee recreated himself again by documenting society and individuals in an America that was enjoying itself. The mythology surrounding him was primarily of his own creation, which today adds an extra dimension to what makes him so fascinating.
One of his pieces of work become the model for Mad's Alfred E. Neuman.
The story of Arthur Fellig is the story of individual American exceptionalism.
We all surely agree that lying is immoral and, most of the time, a terrible thing to do. We all surely agree that lying by omission is equally evil, most of the time. As we say here, a lie is the theft of somebody else's reality.
In life, we tend to identify liars and to distrust them, figuring reasonably that if they lie about one thing, they just tend to be liars. It's not always true, of course, but it's a safe rule of thumb.
Claiming military honors offends a lot of people in a way that claiming honors for other subjects doesn’t. Personally, I think that outlawing things merely because they offend people is a bad idea (and unnecessary–you’ll note that the offender in this case got his comeuppance even before the law was applied), but that’s another argument.
Making lying illegal seems crazy to me. For starters, every politician would be convicted.
Public housing today, even in the post-welfare-reform era, continues to give priority to those of lowest income, which, as a practical matter, means female-headed, single-parent families, who still dominate the projects and the Section 8 housing-voucher program. Census data from the 1950s makes it possible to compare marriage rates in white and black St. Louis neighborhoods. The numbers show that black marriage rates have long lagged behind white rates. In nine predominantly black census tracts, married persons (husbands and wives, not including children) constituted 16.4 percent of the population. In predominantly white census tracts, the number was 24.5 percent—half again higher, before the advent of public housing. Without question, the perverse incentives of public housing and public assistance worsened this situation. In contrast, the incentives created by the private housing market—to maintain two-parent households so as to pool incomes in order to get ahead—would have worked in just the opposite direction.
It's really all about help that wasn't helpful - or even wanted - and perverse incentives.
Related: The Left Is Still Ignoring the Costs of Family Breakdown. In my opinion, the Left ignores it because it creates more household poverty, and thus more government dependency. When has the Left ever championed family values?
The sports news in New York has been dominated the past week and a half by Jeremy Lin. A city overwhelmed by Super Bowl mania has quickly moved on to basketball and a great story in an overlooked point guard who has raised his game and put his team back in the race for the playoffs.
One of the difficulties, however, has been the racism which has been glaringly evident in the coverage. Saturday Night Live did a wonderful send up of this last night, showing the double standard which exists in media today.
Lin is the NBA's Tim Tebow. He has brought a wonderful story to the pros, an inspiring, unlikely, and unexpected story.
One of the most annoying situations you can run into at the office is inertia. The belief that something is done, or happens, just because "that's the way it happens." I've lived my corporate life (for better or worse - usually worse, for me) in a relatively idiosyncratic fashion. I have never enjoyed being a 'Yes Man', and if I sensed groupthink, I'd usually ask a question designed to break the logjam, even if I agreed with the emerging groupthink pattern:
don’t be intimidated by high-level obstructionistswho temporarily impede progress. If it is an idea whose time has come, obstructionists can be overcome by engaging high-level sponsors or they can be circumvented. Bureaucratic inertia yields to an aggressive parallel approach— quick, precise and simultaneous action.
Sometimes these approaches don't work, and you don't win friends this way.
We docs see this all the time, and some docs seem to almost encourage it: "There is always hope," etc.
Aggressive treatment of terminal cancer can be the worst. Refusal to give in to nature's natural processes. Death as the great enemy. Guilt. There is always a time to let go of relationships, and a time to let go of life.
It is often said that "old age is not for sissies," but I have seen terminal torture treatment which the Geneva Convention would hold illegitimate. A friend lost her 52 year-old sister to pancreatic cancer yesterday. Due to heroic efforts, her last three months on earth were made hell when she could have had a peaceful, morphinized passage.
America is swiftly becoming a granny state. Less frail and more involved, today's grandparents are shunning retirement homes and stepping in more than ever to raise grandchildren while young adults struggle in the poor economy.
The newer grandparents are mainly baby boomers who are still working, with greater disposable income. Now making up 1 in 4 adults, grandparents are growing at twice the rate of the overall population and sticking close to family — if their grandkids aren't already living with them.
The modern invention of the nuclear family never really worked out that well, did it? Too isolated, too little support and help, etc. Farm families consisted of extended families.
I have been posting about the value of a rigorous high school education, and the frequently minimal value-added of college for many kids. I forget the average number of study hours of American college kids these days, but it is low. High school can prepare anybody for a lifetime of learning. Maybe you can't take a class with Jacques Barzun, but anybody can read his books.
So here's my question for my readers: Let's hear about people you have known who have led interesting and challenging lives without a college degree, including yourselves if applicable.
I'll start with a few:
- The omniscient, cynical, whiskey-breathed City Editor of an urban newspaper where I worked summers during college - The guy in town who started his plumbing contracting company and now has 50 employees - Bill Gates (I don't really know him) - Our Shakespeare scholar electrician - my Master Gunsmith
His perspective on cultural history is so wide as to view history as a series of births, flowering, decay and finally decadence. “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label. A decadent culture offers opportunity mainly to the satirist…”4 which describes our time perfectly. But just as in the natural world, the cultural world holds the seeds of rebirth within.
She wants one of these (the convertible, please) to show the love:
I want this pair:
However, back in reality, what I am going to do is to make dinner for She Who Must Be Obeyed: Cherrystone clams on the half-shell with lemon slices, then a steamed 3 lb. lobster with home-made horseradish mayo, cucumber slaw and potato salad, with champagne or maybe a nice Meursault. Valentine cupcakes for dessert.
We mentioned that theme here yesterday. Compassion without discernment is generally moral vanity or spiritual-ish pride; often foolish, often counterproductive or destructive, and often humiliating to the recipient. It reminded me of this well-known speech by Ivan Illich (not Ivan Ilyich, who died) on the topic of paternalistic "help." The intro:
An address by Monsignor Ivan Illich to the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects (CIASP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 20, 1968. In his usual biting and sometimes sarcastic style, Illich goes to the heart of the deep dangers of paternalism inherent in any voluntary service activity, but especially in any international service "mission." Parts of the speech are outdated and must be viewed in the historical context of 1968 when it was delivered, but the entire speech is retained for the full impact of his point and at Ivan Illich's request.
I am here to suggest that you voluntarily renounce exercising the power which being an American gives you. I am here to entreat you to freely, consciously and humbly give up the legal right you have to impose your benevolence on Mexico. I am here to challenge you to recognize your inability, your powerlessness and your incapacity to do the "good" which you intended to do.
I am here to entreat you to use your money, your status and your education to travel in Latin America. Come to look, come to climb our mountains, to enjoy our flowers. Come to study. But do not come to help.
ObamaCare is designed to become a government-controlled Welfare program for all, with insurance companies as back offices, check-paying services for a one-size-fits-all government program. Leviathan is always hungry. Freedom and free choice is the cost.
Are there really tons of folks out there who want the federal government in charge of their own medical care? Who really wanted this, except for government? And government employees are exempt from it, which just goes to show...
The politicization of medical help has only just begun. It's a feature, not a bug.
As an aside, recall that the Church supported Obamacare. Compassion, of course. Compassion without discernment is just vanity and foolishness.
Groupon released their first earnings report, and to say the least, they underwhelmed. I had shared some of my thoughts about Groupon several months ago. But something new is afoot.
In the last week, we've seen Facebook file for an IPO. It's been talked about incessantly, and there are many interesting things within the filing which have caused people to begin sharing opinions about it. Since Facebook is in my industry, I find this discussion intriguing and certainly have my own point of view, particularly since I use Facebook.
Originally, I didn't want to join Facebook. Several friends emailed me invitations to join in 2007. I wouldn't accept. Finally, I joined just to stop the invitations. At first, what I found fascinated me. It's actually a terrific picture sharing facility. On the other hand, as Betty White famously said on Saturday Night Live about when she was younger, "We hadPHONEBOOK...seeing pictures of people's vacations was a punishment."
A few items from the Duncan Phyfe show at the Met. His workshop/factory in Manhattan copied, but simplified, the popular styles of the time. Not exactly my taste, but much in demand at the time:
"The core of Murray's book is that if you want to be happy, in the full sense of "eudaimonia" in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics --that is, full human flourishing over a lifetime doing the right things in the right way at the right time -- you need to check in on four basic qualities. You need satisfying work, you need to be married, you need to engage in civil society, and you need to attend church once a week. Look at a community without the Big Four, and you will likely find only 10 percent of people "very happy." Look at folks with all four, and you will find almost 80 percent of people reporting themselves "very happy." Call it the American project: family, vocation, faith, and community. Rush Limbaugh talks about it every day: American exceptionalism. Here is Murray's line on it, from page 305 of Coming Apart.
Upper-class Americans live that way. They work, they get married, they are involved in their communities. They just don't seem to think it matters if other people don't, so they have legislated this monster welfare state that pays people not to work and not to marry, and that harasses them if they join a club or run a church. Our elitists insist on lives with meaning for themselves, but for everyone else, they think life begins and ends with a check: a welfare check, an unemployment check, a severance check, or a Social Security check. And they call that compassion.
Historically, Americans have been different as a people, even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I am thinking of qualities such as American industriousness and neighborliness discussed in earlier chapters, but also American optimism... our striking lack of class envy, and the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies."
The wife of a friend of mine was recently made to feel uncomfortable while visiting her freshman daughter's dorm to see fellows walking around the halls with towels or undershorts with long-neck beers in their hands as if the dorm were some sort of downscale Roman orgy.
I commented that co-ed showers would be the next new thing. The idea of that is, indeed, titillating.
In my paleo view, co-education itself was a bad idea. It ignores the reality of adolescent sexual tension, the reality of distraction, and the distortion of behavior that can ensue. Speaking for myself, the idea of trying to study or sleep knowing that some leggy blonde was in the next room three feet away, alone and perhaps feeling lonely, would make studying Plato a difficult thing to do.
The greatest of storytellers, with an eye for vivid details of life and character types, and a tendency for unlikely dramatic plots.
He had no formal education after age 15, when he went to work. Sold his first book at 21, and fame and fortune ensued for this lad whose dad was in debtor's prison.
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
He wrote casually, effortlessly, humorously. You can learn all anybody needs to know about human nature from Dickens. He had been there and done that.
"Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn't afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed."
"Farewell to Penn Station," New York Times editorial, October 30, 1963
There was a fervor for tearing down old buildings in urban American during the 1960s and early 70s. Many historic, but dilapidated, downtowns were bulldozed, as were countless wonderful "Union Stations" - and anything else that seemed "old".
Today, we cherish towns like Savannah which were left untouched by the government scourge of "urban renewal."
19th century housing was replaced by "modern" Soviet-style planned and government-subsidized housing projects (which finally are beginning to be dynamited themselves, for good reason). And the buildings were replaced with parking lots and sterile semi-high rises, and malls - that horrible concept which turns its back on the town in an effort to create an unreal, soul-less consumer paradise for the masses.
When you drive through downtown Bridgeport, CT, Hartford, or Nashville, you will be hard put to find an old building. Lucky towns escaped this frenzy of "modernization," which I term "dehumanization." Nobody wants to be in those sorts of downtowns.
Pennsylvania Station on the West Side of Manhattan - one of the masterpieces of the beaux-art movement -did not escape the epidemic of destruction. Grand Central Station escaped - but only barely. Just tell me - where would you rather wait 40 minutes for a train to meet your girlfriend or boyfriend - the new Penn Station, or Grand Central?
Photo below of the 1910 McKim, Mead and White Penn Station, from this site of NYC architectural images. Who would have the nerve to knock this thing down and replace it with the new (and truly terrible in every way) Madison Square Garden?
Truth be told, this whole commentary was just an excuse to post this photo:
Everyone enjoyed The Firesign Theater, but I have not seen any weed for more years than I can count. Never inhaled. Shoes for Industry! Papoon for President! One organism - one vote.
Bert and I did downbeat Down East humor. Guys who can do that schtick are not uncommon, especially as aging alcoholic cooks in Maine hunting camps. Man, have I heard some good ones, spellbinding for a 30 minute absurd story, provided you keep the guy's glass full.
Uncle Ed and I will never forget the shaggy dog story of the kid who grazed a buck in an orchard up the road, and rode it home on his bicycle draped over the handlebars until the deer came to, and began pedaling the bike himself and rode it into the center of town. These stories fade from reality into fantasy so that you do not quite know where you are. Bert and I made famous the Maine response to the city folk in their fancy car who asked for directions from the farmer: "You can't get there from here."
Bob Bryant and Marshall Dodge made records of this sort of good stuff. Try a couple of the short samples here. You can buy them here.
Why is Maine "down east"? You should know by now. I will not explain it again.
Over the course of quite a few visits to Italy, I have read a good deal about Italian history, art, and architecture. Much of what I learn, I eventually forget unless I use it.
Went to the opening of 
One in four Americans are grandparents, soon to be 1 in 3. From 
I have been posting about the value of a rigorous high school education, and the frequently minimal value-added of college for many kids. I forget the average number of study hours of American college kids these days, but it is low. High school can prepare anybody for a lifetime of learning. Maybe you can't take a class with Jacques Barzun, but anybody can read his books.
The wife of a friend of mine was recently made to feel uncomfortable while visiting her freshman daughter's dorm to see fellows walking around the halls with towels or undershorts with long-neck beers in their hands as if the dorm were some sort of downscale Roman orgy.
The greatest of storytellers, with an eye for vivid details of life and character types, and a tendency for unlikely dramatic plots.
