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.
Like me, you all are probably still engaged in some slow and tedious post-Christmas clean-up. I tend to use the shopping bags and small boxes to start my morning fires.
Some of the bags I used for fire-starting said "Michael Kors." What's that? Guys would not know. I checked it out:
It's fashionable shoes and dresses and stuff. Who got that stuff? I dunno, but it seems pretty nice.
A year ago I moved into a row house in northeast Washington, D.C., two
miles from the Capitol. I paid $85,000, a price so low it’s a punch line
in a city where the average home sells for more than $600,000.
The hot water heater was missing, and the bathroom tub drained into a
downstairs closet. My house inspector, a dead ringer for the
gravel-voiced actor Sam Elliott, tramped silently from room to room,
occasionally pausing to pronounce, “It’s not proper.” The house was in
foreclosure and had been vacant for a couple of years, so when I found
crayons under the old carpet, I was spared the guilt of imagining them
in still-young fingers. But once, someone had loved this place. The
backyard bloomed with rosebushes staked with weathered shoelaces. With
an FHA-backed loan and a savvy contractor, I gutted the house and
renovated it. I found myself realizing a dream I’d assumed was miles out
of reach: I was a homeowner.
Many people today are obsessed with food, what to eat and how much. Government wants to get in on the game and to tell you what to eat, but the experts have no answers. So governments just make it up.
...several top medical scientists have concluded that the government’s carb-heavy guidelines may actually have harmed public health. In 2008, three researchers from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine—including the associate dean of clinical research, Paul Marantz, and a former president of the International Hypertension Society, Michael Alderman—observed in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine that since 1977, Americans have largely followed the government’s advice, doubtless as conveyed by the doctors they consulted. Men, for instance, cut their fat intake from 37 percent of their daily calories to 32 percent and increased their carbohydrate intake from 42 percent to 49 percent. Yet over the same three decades, the fraction of American men who were overweight or obese increased from 53 percent of the population to about 69 percent. The doctors wondered whether this correlation was an unintended consequence of telling the entire population to change its eating patterns. “In general,” the doctors wrote, “weak evidentiary support has been accepted as adequate justification for [the U.S. dietary] guidelines.
Read the whole thing. My sense is that you can eat whatever you want unless you have some special illness like diabetes, and it won't make a darn bit of difference. Food is not medicine. All we really know is that no food is bad, plenty of food - but not too much - is good.
As someone who lives adjacent to a river (a small one, but larger than a stream - around 30-40' wide in dry season), I know all about flooding. The prosperous farmer who built the core of my house in 1803 had the brains to build his house and barns above the level of flooding, even just barely above the level of 100-year floods.
Our new (c. 1890) barn was built on the old barn foundations. We have had water right up to the footings from the river 200 yards away.
Our land is flooded regularly, and it does wonders for the meadows but it fills my pool with silt, branches, dead fish, leaves, etc. Knocks down our fencing, too. Most of our land is on a flood plain, and only about 1/4 of it is above the plain.
If you live on a flood plain, whether salt or fresh, flooding must be part of your life plan. I think it makes good sense to have farmland, open space, natural preserves, etc on flood plains, but it drives me crazy that the Feds subsidize construction on flood plains via flood insurance. That is just plain stupid. If you live in a flood plain, you should live in a trailer that can be moved to higher ground with a pickup truck. I did live for a spell in one like that (but I did not really like it).
Levees and other Army Corps of Engineers devices only worsen the flooding that rivers regularly perform for the benefit of the richness of the flood plains. They attempt to turn rivers into drainage ditches instead of the ever-changing, meandering, shape-changing wild things that they are.
The argument is fair enough, but the question is who gets to decide what is made public? The press? People are obviously interested in what "leaders" and celebs do in their spare time.
Greeks’ and theologians’ dour double disapproval of money has been the hideous inheritance of the West. Reinforced by aristocratic and would-be aristocratic disdain for work, hostility to wealth had, by the mid-19th century, torn free of its intellectual roots and become one of those ideas accepted without thought by a certain kind of intellectual, whatever his relationship to Greeks or theologians. Marx was heir to this prejudice, and the millions killed by Marx’s followers its victims. So pervasive was this idea that even 19th-century Utilitarianism, whose principle of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” should have made its followers leading advocates of economic liberty (as, indeed, they began), evolved over time a hostility to getting and spending; John Stuart Mill ended his life a socialist.
Nowadays, all it takes is one jackass to mess things up for everybody else. Why does one whining person have more power than hundreds of non-whining people? "I'm offended. Rearrange the world for me."
Given the statistical likelihood that there is at least one stupid, selfish or self-righteous jackass fault-finder in any group, it's guaranteed that somebody will bitch about something every time anything happens.
Do people attempt mass murder because they want better schools and better sewers? From Dalrymple's Sewer Thing:
...to return to the question of intellectuals and their appreciation of human motivation. On the one hand they seem to want to deny the deeper currents that underlie the most extraordinary behaviour such as suicide bombing; on the other, they want to deny the quite ordinary or commonplace motivation for genuinely prosaic behaviour, such as spending too much. This is odd.
Perhaps they want to preserve the notion that man is by nature fundamentally good. In the Guardian article with which I started we are introduced to the concept of the altruistic suicide bomber, a concept derived from the fact that those who survived their attempted bombings claimed to be in pursuit of some altruistic end, when asked afterwards. It is surely very naïve to take this at face value: anyone caught in the middle of committing, and prevented from continuing, genocide would presumably argue the same thing. What the intellectual does not want to admit is that there is a joy in rage, and a joy in expressing that rage by evil deeds. And this is because we are constituted as we are: original sin, if that is how you want to put it.
Similarly, lust for easy gain is common enough. It is a human universal, not in the sense that it has always existed in all places and everywhere, but in the sense that it exists as soon as there is the opportunity for it to manifest itself. That is to say, there will be no final victory over such greed, and I have very little doubt that at some time in the not distant future there will be yet another epidemic of it, if we are not indeed in the midst of one already.
Read the whole good thing (link above). We have always contended here at Maggie's that a flaw in Leftist visions of paradise is an unrealistic view, or I could say fantasy, about the true nature of fallen mankind.
My tailor grandfather taught me the difference between being a Jew and being honored.
When I was a little boy, holding my grandfather’s hand as we exited the synagogue, all the well-dressed people were walking around a disheveled, crying man at the bottom of the steps.My grandfather immediately went up to him and asked what was the matter. Years later, my grandfather told me that the man replied with sobs that he’d lost his job because of drinking, his wife had left him after he had an affair, and he was too ashamed of what had happened to his life to come into synagogue. My grandfather took him by the hand and in they went, me trailing behind.
Afterwards I asked my grandfather why he hadn’t also invited the man home with us for supper.My grandfather answered that as long as the man behaved, he should be welcome in synagogue, but due to how he had behaved toward his responsibilities he wasn’t welcome in his house. Any Jew who wants to join communal prayers can do so. Any Jew who dishonors his people doesn’t deserve to be honored.
Our universities used to be called temples of learning but most universities have relaxed their former standards, as have many Jews.
I am always amused by health advice because it so often turns out to be wrong, and because popular writing on health so consistently confuses correlation with causation. Nevertheless, I do take a daily Vit D as one of my compromises with magical thinking. Lipitor too, for the same reason.
A friend recommended a book, The Lords of Poverty (1998). A quote from an Amazon reviewer:
Hancock's writing style here may be a sustained rant, but it nevertheless provides a great deal of useful information and tears down many of the misconceptions most Americans or Europeans may have about the international aid industry. Particularly interesting is his criticism of the various UN agencies and, especially, the World Bank and the IMF - whose projects all too often do more harm than good (if they do any good at all). Perhaps the most disturbing aspect exposed in this book is still quite valid today: that taxpayers in the big donor countries like the U.S., Germany, Japan, the U.K. etc. are footing the bill for many disastrous projects worldwide that make the lives of impoverished populations even worse and often destroy in the environment in the process. "Lords of Poverty" may be dated, but it's still well worth the read.
Wherever beauty lies in wait for us, there arises a desire to preempt
its appeal, to smother it with scenes of destruction. Hence the many
works of contemporary art that rely on shocks administered to our
failing faith in human nature—such as the crucifix pickled in urine by
Andres Serrano. Hence the scenes of cannibalism, dismemberment, and
meaningless pain with which contemporary cinema abounds, with directors
like Quentin Tarantino having little else in their emotional
repertories. Hence the invasion of pop music by rap, whose words and
rhythms speak of unremitting violence, and which rejects melody,
harmony, and every other device that might make a bridge to the old
world of song. And hence the music video, which has become an art form
in itself and is often devoted to concentrating into the time span of a
pop song some startling new account of moral chaos. Those phenomena record a habit of desecration in which life is not
celebrated by art but targeted by it. Artists can now make their
reputations by constructing an original frame in which to display the
human face and throw dung at it.
When I was an adolescent, we thought that "beauty" was old-fashioned, for the old fogies, and that rough and ugly was hip. Little did I know then about how beauty can be so elusive, temporary, and precious.
The average contemporary human does not consider the sublime much. Life
is not seen as linear --with an end -- or even circular, with an eastern
repetition. In many people's mind they were never a baby and will never
be old. It's a botoxed cougar world, facing off against forty year old
men still dressing up like Star Wars characters.
I don't want to be sixty years old at a Coldplay concert with a
girlfriend on my shoulders, thanks. I don't think it will be fun to
eventually look at eternity and only have fifteen minutes of real adult
behavior in your CV. And I don't want to act as if children are just
short adults. I'm six-foot-two, there's plenty of short adults around
already. It's common for people to remark that they don't want to see
children out in public, and old people should find an ice floe before we
have to find one for you.
"Real adult behavior"? "Ice floe"? Ice floe in my glass of Scotch, thanks very much. Well, I happen to be into the sublime, wherever I can find it. Sipp links these charming short vids from one of the civilized youths of today.
A handful of pills and a few minutes of canned shrinkology is not enough to tend to a soul in turmoil and in pain. Take my word for it. People are complicated. For most people with troubles, sooner or later they have to face themselves, their flaws, and their self-defeating or destructive tendencies with honesty, and it is best done in the patient company of a decent soul who knows a thing or two about it all, and knows how to dig just deep enough to try to get to the heart of things; to gently drive a wedge through the devilish defenses to address the real "issues."
Some of us, or many of us, the Old Guard, are still here if you want to try to talk from the heart. Life itself is difficult enough, and having to struggle with one's own self just makes it harder for all.
The Photopic Sky Survey is an interactive 5000 megapixel photograph of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,000+ photos. A beautiful example of data aggregation, annotation, and exploration.
After fishing yesterday, Gwynnie and I took a drive through Lyme, CT, as charming and homey an antique town as I have ever seen in the US. It runs along the east bank of the lower Connecticut River, has wonderful riverside marshes for bird watching, fishing, and hunting, and has a fine cove with a marina - Hamburg Cove. "Quaint and charming" can be real things in our Yankeeland.
I even began looking at the For Sale signs (which was my first symptom of Lyme Disease), but there is no work for my profession there, I'm afraid. For jukebox maintenance and repair, one must go where there are jukeboxes...
Where I live, there are many highly-accomplished, scary-smart and mega-educated people, but "quaint and charming" does not jump to mind. ("Wonderful friends" does jump to mind.)
I took a few snaps, but Gwynnie declined to stop for my architectural photography. I don't blame him - if you stopped every time I wanted a pic, one would never arrive at one's destination. I can be a pest, that way. Also, in other ways (pedantic, insensitive, critical, intolerant, etc.).
For Fish a great sentence is like a great athletic performance. It is an example of something done supremely well, so well that it cannot be bettered. Other similar feats will come along, but only to stand alongside it. What exactly is done in such a performance? There is no single answer, indeed no finite answer since there is no limit to the things that can be done with words. But it is what Conrad called the “shape and ring” of sentences, the perfect adaptation of form to achievement, that Fish wants to share.
I can tell you that some certainly are, some could care less, and some find it an abomination.
Porn, recreational sex, prostitution, rape, illicit seduction, perversions, etc. have been going on since there have been humans. That's a fact. Humans are endowed with the wackiest sex drives and wackiest imaginations of all animals and, depending on conditions and circumstances, not always the most mature or honorable behavior.
But what about the ladies? A teen gal recently told me that somebody said to her, in the bathroom after a frat party, "I am so pissed that I didn't get any dick tonight." How times have changed. Or have they?
I suppose that the voyeuristic TV show Hoarders has raised the visibility of hoarding. It's one of those OCD-type of things that fades from totally insane to fairly normal.
If what you like to hoard is money, then you're just thrifty or stingy. If you like to hoard "collectible" items, then you're a collector: Art, rocks, knives, rugs, guns, pinball machines, etc.
If you can't get rid of stuff you don't really need to the point that it interferes with life, it gets to be a problem. Come to think of it, hoarding money can have the same effect.
I cannot embed this bit. If interested, there are more of these on YouTube - like this one: We can't have people over to our house:
Are you and I machines? Are we analyzable without remainder into a collection of mechanisms whose operation can be fully explained by the causal operation of physical and chemical laws, starting from the parts and proceeding to the whole? It might seem so, judging from the insistent testimony of those whose work is to understand life.
There is little doubt about the biologist’s declared obsession with mechanisms of every sort — “genetic mechanisms,” “epigenetic mechanisms,” “regulatory mechanisms,” “signaling mechanisms,” “oncogenic mechanisms,” “immune mechanisms,” “circadian clock mechanisms,” “DNA repair mechanisms,” “RNA splicing mechanisms,” and even “molecular mechanisms of plasticity.” The single phrase “genetic mechanism” now yields over 25,000 hits in Google Scholar and the count seems to be rising by hundreds per month. But no cellular entity or process is exempt; everything has been or will be baptized a “mechanism.” In an informal analysis of technical papers I’ve collected, I found an average of 7.5 uses of mechanism per article, with the number in a single article varying from 1 to 32. This is not even counting cognate forms such as mechanistic and machine.
Using mechanical metaphors probably sounded advanced, and scientifically anti-vitalistic 100 years ago, but now it seems quaint. The metaphors we use are important, because they tend to be reified by people outside a given field of expertise.
We easily forget that vitalism was a metaphor, like phlogiston. Our next batch of metaphors for everything will be systems-oriented, until the next new thing comes along.
Teaching writing is a difficult task, if not a nearly impossible one. Eliminating standards and propagandizing is so much easier. So easy, any idiot can - and does - do it.
The thing is, you don't have to know a damn thing about the craft of writing to propagandize. This is truly appalling: Writing Teachers: Still Crazy After All These Years. Crazy, for sure, and utterly out of reality and out of usefulness.
You have to either laugh or cry.
It sounds like going to writing class today is like going to shop class and learning about the oppression of the worker instead of how to use a lathe. Might be useful if you want to become a Community Organizer, but not if you ever want to make anything.
I had to run home this afternoon to meet with my chimney guy. Actually, not my chimney guy, but my semi-local sheet-metal guy.
I never had a sheet-metal guy, but I'm glad to have one now. He can make whatever you need in his wood-heated shop in an old mill building in CT, and he will install what he makes, too. Cheerfully.
Our old farmhouse has three fireplaces. We needed some new flashing, new collars, caps, etc. to keep the rain and the animals out. That was a piece of cake for the good old guy. He promised me that his patch-up job would outlive me, which isn't saying much. In olde Yankeeland, everything is a patch-up job.
I chatted up his 20-something black assistant. He said "Man, we have a beautiful shop. We can make anything - copper, aluminum, stainless, plain steel - whatever you want. Ducts, flashing, roofs, gutters, whatever. Square ducting, round ducting, whatever you need. We have the technology. We built our own wood stove too."
"What do you do for wood?" I asked.
"Oh, our tree guy friends just dump it off for us. Saves them a dump fee. We cut and split it ourselves. We load the stove up at night, and it's as warm as toast when we come to work in the morning."
Because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly;
Because of all the television commercials, cocktail parties, and assorted social posturing I thus escape;
Because in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing things they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion;
Because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed or impressed by power, but respond only to quietude and humility and endless patience;
Because I suspect that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don't want to waste the trip;
Because mercifully there are no telephones on trout waters;
Because only in the woods can I find solitude without loneliness;
Because bourbon out of an old tin cup always tastes better out there;
Because maybe one day I will catch a mermaid;
And finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important, but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant - and not nearly so much fun.
Robert Traver
A mermaid, or a cougar in a tree? Cougar safely below the fold -
Many people today are obsessed with food, what to eat and how much. Government wants to get in on the game and to tell you what to eat, but the experts have no answers. So governments just make it up.
I suppose this is a companion piece to my post last week, 
