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.
Victims of hoplophobia need help and understanding, along with firearms re-education from sensitive Social Workers who are not only caring, but carryin'.
The "irrational fear of weapons" is a health crisis which must be crushed before it spreads, as it has spread in Canada, Australia, and the UK. Can we call it the Hoplophobia Flu? It is not yet known why women and metrosexuals seem more vulnerable to this debilitating and life-threatening scourge.
One theory is that is spread by contact with infected newsprint, but other medical researchers believe that a loud "Boom" is just innately disturbing to some people with fragile nervous systems.
We need many more highly-paid professional union-member Hoplophobia Specialists in our schools and businesses if we are determined to defeat this plague. Only Government Resources can hope to have an impact on this crisis, but "a substantial national investment is required," according to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, before "this thing gets out of hand."
An Epidemiological Psychiatry researcher at the CDC commented "Guns go Boom. This is scarey for some, but they need professional help. This phobia has the power to spread just like the Bird Flu. It is highly infectious to vulnerable adults. This phobia has the power to render honest folk, sportsmen and sportswomen and sports-transgenders, and innocent hunter-gatherers, helpless not only against bad guys, but against food on the wing and hoof. Indeed, it is no different, in effect, than having a weak immune system, or being a de-clawed kitty cat."
Image: A very nice Lady without Hoplophobia, hunting Islamo-fascists on her farm without a license, unlike her weenie son.
Frederick Church (1826-1900). His Heart of the Andes, below, brought him fame. A brief bio of Church here, and a good summary of The Hudson River School, and what they wanted to convey in their work (which was very much out of fashion in the 20th century for being overly-sentimental and unsophisticated), here.
She addresses author Sam Harris' contention that religion concerns ideas which are "patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive." Harris appears to view religion as the prime source of evil in the world:
When we find reliable ways to make human beings more loving, less fearful, and genuinely enraptured by the fact of our appearance in the cosmos, we will have no need for divisive religious myths.
A three-times daily dose of pot, LSD, crystal meth, and heroin ought to work fine - or Soma: That quote sounds more than a little Brave New Worldish for me; as Sisu notes: "find reliable ways to make human beings more loving," "Make them...?" We who?"
Right. I suspect he means more docile towards his view. What if it pleases me to be difficult and controlling and arrogant and cantakerous and opinionated....like Harris? Read her piece.
Two weeks after breast cancer surgery, two days ago my pal lands this 140# Tarpon. Captain Juan Garcia of Indian Key, Fla. helps hoist the big guy on deck. Would make a lovely addition to the den, but they let him go...the right thing to do. If you got hooked by temptation, wouldn't you want God to set you free?
It is no wonder than dear Albion is sliding inextricably into the mire if men are now spending time in front of the mirror, wondering do these jeans make my bum look big? No, they don’t – its all the Mars bars you eat & if you have a problem with that, don’t eat any more. As one of the 66% of those who don’t have a problem with my burgeoning middle age waistline, this morning I had a full fat boy breakfast, all served up with a side order of extra lard because you know it makes sense.
The guys will be ready and drooling, waiting for some fresh meat young things on campus - so Get ready now. Remember, gals: College is all about Boys, Boobs, Basketball and Beer - The Four B's. So don't let yourself get distracted by all of the classroom stuff like Math and History etc, because you will need Straight A's in the Four B's or end up an unstreetable nobody like Charlotte Simmons with depression and anorexia and an un-cool boyfriend - a like Science Loser, instead of a hot Double-D Communications Major with medically-enhanced lips too - wow.
Enjoy college, gals! And if you want a doctorate, let's practice by playing PhD doctor.
Warmest personal regards,
Larry "Long Larry" Summers, VP, Marketing, Plastic Assets, Inc. Former Prez, HU
Psychoanalytic theory isn't really very complicated. We only have three or four basic concepts, from which a myriad of fascinating ideas derive.
One of the key basic concepts is Transference. At the risk of annoying readers who hate fashionable words like "template," I have to use "template". To keep it simple, a transference is a relationship template, usually molded during youth, and mostly unconscious - by which we mean that we aren't aware that it is acting on us.
Transferences distort our relationships as our brains attempt to apply the template of prior relationships, or, more often, our distorted versions of prior relationships, onto current ones.
Most common are paternal and maternal transferences, but sibling transferences, grandparent, friend and avuncular transferences are common too. (What's the female version of avuncular? Avauntuler?)
Because our transferences tend to be beneath our awareness, they are usually only evident to analysts when observing behaviors or feelings which do not seem to fit the real current-life situation. Thus the less transference-driven our relationships are, the more mature and in reality they tend to be.
As psychoanalytic concepts have been integrated into everyday thinking over the past 100 years, there has been a degradation of the technical terms. Thus we can talk about a "maternal transference" towards government, for example, when someone experiences their government as "need-fulfulling", or a "paternal transference" towards government when it is experienced as "opportunity-providing, demanding, and challenging."
Even if such uses of the concept may not fit the technical usage, they are sometimes useful ways of thinking. For example, it is commonly stated that people tend to view the Democrats as the Mommy Party, and Republicans as the Daddy Party. It sounds like a ridiculous simplification when you hear it, but there is something to it: politics is not rational.
I was moved to write this post because of a couple of items on the blog this week. Pieces about Europe: the passivity of Britain and Norway in the face of their enemies within; the economic irrationality of French socialism, etc.
Such things represent what we would term "regressions" to "transferences." In other words, backwards developmental steps to more immature and less realistic ways of experiencing the world. When a kid privileged and smart enough to attend the Sorbonne feels he needs to rebel for job security, you know you are dealing with people who have reverted to a child-like, maternal experience of their government. It does not bode well for a nation whose youth seeks security over challenge, and comfort over life adventure.
Similarly, in Britain, with their willful denial of the social cancer they have welcomed, we see a "regression" to a "nicey-nice" childish view of the world in which evil and unpleasantness do not exist - a Mommy World. They tried that before, didn't they?
Despite all of the push in the direction of the Mommy World since Franklin Roosevelt, the US has never fully succumbed to the fantasy that government can make everything "nice." Thank goodness for that. In the US, many people tend to more annoyed when the government does something than when it doesn't.
Thus the US does, indeed, tend to have less transference towards government - eg a less emotionally distorted relationship with government. Most of us want it to just drive away our enemies and to leave us alone, but we do have our share of those who wish the government could make all of our dreams come true.
Lots more to say but this is getting too long. If you like my ideas, click our Psychoanalyst category and read more and get smart.
Real Irishmen like to have a pint at the pub on the way to work. Every day, not just on the Feast of St. Patrick, which is not a big event in Ireland. To make it breakfast, the barman stirs in one or two raw eggs. Then a fellow is ready for work.
But that is just breakfast. Here is the Irish version of haute cuisine. You cannot have too much mustard to go with it, and the meat has to be falling apart.
How do nations create wealth? Liberating people's minds, and rewarding effort and ambition, seem to be key factors. Coyote at Coyote Blog plays Adam Smith and offers this:
Groups of people create wealth faster in direct proportion to the degree that:
Their philosophical and intellectual culture values ordinary men (not just "the elite", however defined) questioning established beliefs and social patterns. This is as opposed to having a rigid orthodoxy which treats independent thinking as heresy.
Individuals, again not just the elite, have the ability through scholarship or entrepreneurship to pursue the implications of their ideas and retain the monetary and other rewards for themselves. This is as opposed to being locked into a rigid social and economic hierarchy that would prevent an individual from acting on a good idea.
China, for example, just by cracking open the spigot on #2, however inadequately, has gone from a country with mass starvation in three or four decades to one where the worry-warts of the world are scared of juvenile obesity. To a large extent, this theorem is really just a poor restatement of Julian Simon's work. Simon's key point was that the only relevant resource was the human mind, from which all wealth flows. All I have done is break this into two parts, saying that to create wealth a society has to value the individual's use of his mind and has to allow that individual free reign to pursue the products of his thinking.
Greenwich, CT is not a Yankee town with dominant Yankee values. It's a NYC suburb which nowadays partakes more of NYC bling than Connecticut country modesty. But even Greenwich has limits. Mr. Jacobs is getting into problems with his 38,000 sq. foot house. Image from the NYT article:
Most well-organized families already have their summer family trips planned, but all we have is our options nailed down.
But it is already time to plan for hunting season. We have our reservations in at the Miramichi Inn in New Brunswick for October grouse and woodcock season. If you have never hunted these birds, the photo gives a good sense of what the brush is like that you have to bust your way through in hopes of getting a shot off at a distant brown blur.
A solid and enjoyable summary of the music of The Beatles, from Terry Teachout. One quote:
Such an appraisal must begin by taking into account the fact that the Beatles were the first rock-and-roll musicians to be written about as musicians. Elvis Presley, for instance, had attracted vast amounts of attention from the press, but for the most part he was treated as a mass-culture phenomenon rather than as an artist, and so were the other rock musicians of the 50’s and early 60’s (and the swing-era band-leaders and vocalists who came before them). Not so the Beatles. Almost from the time they began making records in 1962, their music was taken seriously—and praised enthusiastically—by such noted classical composers as Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Ned Rorem and such distinguished critics and commentators as William Mann, Hans Keller, and Wilfrid Mellers.
This collection of metaphors and analogies are reputed to have been collected from High School essays. Count me a skeptic there, but who knows:
Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two other sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a Guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.
The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and "Jeopardy" comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.
Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access T:\flw.quid55328 .com\aaakklch@ung but gets T: \flw.quidaaakklch@ung by mistake.
Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.
They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.
Read more of these metaphors on Continuation Page below:
Kay Hymowitz reviews Mansfield's much talked-about new book in Commentary. A few paragraphs from the review:
Harvey Mansfield sets off into America’s treacherous sexual wilderness with a clear destination in mind: to rescue manliness from the bear-like clutches of its enemies, in particular feminists and advocates of a gender-neutral society. As he notes, the opponents of manliness have tried to depose the term altogether, in favor of “masculinity.” They want to expose manliness as a mere social invention, a rationale for male power.
But this, Mansfield observes, begs the question of why men have always had the power in the first place. He finds the answer in manliness, which he defines as “confidence in the face of risk,” an “easy assumption of authority” that leads to an abundance of corollary qualities stereotypically associated with the male of the species. If the womanly tendency is to seek intimacy and personal warmth, the manly tendency is to dominate.
Mansfield concedes that the manly man is not always appealing. He can be willful and boastful, and patronizing toward women. But these annoyances are part of a package that makes the average Joe capable of greater heroism and command than the average Josephine. More open to facing risk, he is more likely to gain and wield power and to make his mark in the world. There can be manly women—Elizabeth I and Margaret Thatcher come to mind—but they are rare.
Male power is not a social artifact, Mansfield argues, but a reflection of our nature, as much a part of biological reality as testosterone itself. This explains the failure of the androgynous utopia promised by the 1960’s. Even after decades of re-educating the young, the line between male and female activities has been “blurred” but not erased. Men, he points out, still drive trucks, fly planes, fix cars, and mow lawns. Women still teach kindergarten, empty hospital bedpans, and clean the kitchen.
Truth is, I do none of those particular male or female things, except sometimes clean the kitchen when it gets really bad. But if Mansfield were President of Harvard, instead of a Yale Prof, he'd be fired for writing this book. Entire review here.
Grant Wood's American Gothic, a portrait of his sister and his dentist, is considered America's most famous painting, with perhaps Whistler's Mother a close runner-up.
Is this picture a satire? Is it a condescending portrayal of a stern and severe midwestern attitude? I doubt it. And why the pitchfork? Sandall has written a piece on the painting, with attention to Paris Hilton.
I took this picture of a duck a few days ago. I have been told it is pretty good as wildlife pictures go... so I'm sending it to you knowing that many of you are sportsmen and will appreciate her it. Perhaps you would be so kind as to help me identify this healthybabe duck, fellas?
In 1950 Alan Turing, the famous WWll code-breaker and computer pioneer, proposed his test of whether computers can think: It you can't tell the difference between a computer responding to you and a person, the computer can think. The "Chinese Room" experiment is a variant of the Turing Test.
I've always thought that the question "Can people think?" is a more relevant one. And what is thinking anyway? Much of what passes for human thought is emotion, application of old mental templates, and intuition.
As if to prove this point, there are now Artificial Intelligence gurus who take positions on AI based on ideology. A quote from a piece by Halpern:
In discussing the “system” argument against his Chinese Room thought experiment, Searle once said, “It is not easy for me to imagine how someone who was not in the grip of an ideology would find the idea at all plausible.” The AI champions, in their desperate struggle to salvage the idea that computers can or will think, are indeed in the grip of an ideology: they are, as they see it, defending rationality itself. If it is denied that computers can, even in principle, think, then a claim is being tacitly made that humans have some special property that science will never understand—a “soul” or some similarly mystical entity. This is of course unacceptable to many scientists.
In the deepest sense, the AI champions see their critics as trying to reverse the triumph of the Enlightenment, with its promise that man’s mind can understand everything, and as retreating to an obscurantist, religious outlook on the world. They see humanity as having to choose, right now, between accepting the possibility, if not the actual existence, of thinking machines and sinking back into the Dark Ages.
Read the entire lengthy but solid update on AI, in The New Atlantis.
For those with freezers full of game, now that this hunting season winds to a close, try thisGame Cookery site.� How many hunting seasons does a person have? Each one�is precious; each one could be our last one;�and each critter is a precious thing which deserves to be cooked with the utmost care.
Eisenhower was the last Republican president not to be subject to rage unto paranoia, press hostility, and continual assault, disrespect, and contempt from the political opposition. (However, it is a fact that the leader of the war that saved the "free world" from fascism was widely viewed as a dunce by the Adlai Stevenson supporters.)
If you are old enough to recall, Nixon was subject to what we would now call a "Nixon Derangement Syndrome" which finally brought him down. So were Ford and Reagan and Bush 41. All were demonized, called "stupid," and intensely hated by the opposition.
Having learned this unfortunate lesson, the Republicans finally decided to try that same game with Clinton, who they managed to handcuff politically via relentless ankle-biting, but were never able to rally intense hatred against him - probably partly because of press sympathy but also because the foundations of hatred were not present.
Where does this hatred come from? I think the Left believes that they are the "good smart guys," and any Repub a "bad dumb guy." I do not think that Conservatives tend to use such a black-and-white view of politics. Most Conservatives I know do not see themselves as the good guys, but as having better ideas. Thus, amongst Liberals, you rarely see the kind of social stresses that people like neo-neocon go through in being a neocon in a Left-liberal community.
(Take me, for an example. I do not believe that I am "smarter" or "better" than Leftys and Liberals. I do believe that the ideas I hold about the relationship of the individual to the State are better ideas, that offer to bring out the best in people, but "some of my best friends are liberals," and it doesn't bother me at all. Friendship and shared interests should trump politics. When my Liberal pals are willing to discuss issues rationally, and not emotionally, I think it can be fun to debate and that it can add something to a friendship.)
Along with the good guy/bad guy syndrome comes a sense of entitlement, I believe. If we are the good guys, then we deserve to be in charge. If we aren't, then something has gone terribly wrong, or something nefarious has occurred, or Americans are idiots. Feeling powerless when you "know" you are right makes some people nuts. (Never forget, though, that if American voters are idiots - it's the same idiots that vote when you win an election.)
I find the hatred that is generated by this disappointed sense of entitlement to be very destructive. Debating ideas and world views is great, but hatred, lying, tantrums, and attribution of malevolence to other public servants is not the civil society I want to live in.
(I also believe that not everything about this subject is psychological, per se. Liberals care more intensely about politics, because they are more invested in the role and power of the state. As a rule of thumb, except in the case of war, Conservatives tend to want to lessen the power of the State over the individual, Liberals to increase it. And yes, I think Bush is a conservative at heart, but a politician in practice....and I mean in "practice".)
My message to the Bush-Deranged: there is no good vs. bad here. There are simply differing ideas and differing views of human nature - all deserving of rational debate. Let's debate - not hate.
Cool book. Gwynnie made me read it because I had forgotten the Danish Viking kings of England - the Canutes etc.
My favorite - George lll. A good fellow, for sure. We demonized him here in the US during the Revolution, but he was just trying to pay his bills, like all of us. "Farmer George" they called him. Sadly, a victim of porphyria later in his life. Always interesting to see that the loss of the American colonies is just a footnote in Brit history.
There are as many different thinking "styles" as there are personality types. But we obviously cannot be aware of our unconscious reflections - by definition.
Every student of chemistry remembers Kekule, to whom the structure of the benzene ring came in a dream. Apparently for many people, not thinking about something can be a way for the mind to think about it.
Snap judgments about people and places can be remarkably accurate, and there is no substitute for simple logic and reflection in determining questions like which alarm clock or cellphone is the best value.
But many more important decisions — choosing the right apartment, the optimal house, the best vacation — turn on such a bewildering swarm of facts that people often throw up their hands and put the whole thing temporarily out of mind. And new research suggests that this may be a rewarding strategy.
In a series of experiments reported last week in the journal Science, a team of Dutch psychologists found that people struggling to make complex decisions did best when they were distracted and were not able to think consciously about the choice at all.
Lanchester in The New Yorker reviews two books on the subject of happiness. Interesting stuff. A Quote:
He (McMahon) points out that the Founding Fathers, who queried, crossed out, and haggled over every line of the Declaration, let the “pursuit of Happiness” stand unedited and unamended. But he also points out that the eighteenth-century understanding of “pursuit” was rather darker than it might seem now. Dr. Johnson’s dictionary defined it as “the act of following with hostile intention,” and McMahon adds that “if one thinks of pursuing happiness as one pursues a fugitive . . . the ‘pursuit of happiness’ takes on a somewhat different cast.”
The legacy of that ambiguity is with us still. We are pursuing happiness to this day, and it is by no means clear that it is a happy process. The self-help section in any bookshop is easy to mock—indeed, it sometimes seems that the titles of self-help books are almost mocking themselves—but there is nothing to mock about the people standing in front of the shelves looking for guidance. In fact, the advice in self-help books is, by and large, pretty good. The trouble is that it is very difficult to take.
Just got one of these cases for my 16 ga side-by-side, and these are fine. Galazan.
And if you take your shotgun out of the case to go bird hunting, over time there is over a 50% chance you'll be peppered by bird shot. Powerline has that story, but erroneously uses the term "BBs." BBs are much larger than "bird shot," and generally are only used for cartridges designed for geese. It seems far less likely in European driven hunting, where the shooter shoots from a "peg" without moving, while the birds come from one direction - and usually high. In the US, we actually hunt, and therefore tend to get scattered around at times. The only perfectly safe bird hunting is one man (or gal) and one dog.
But this subject does bring to mind the great movie, The Shooting Party, (1985) with James Mason and John Gielgud. If you haven't seen it, you must. It's a meditation on pre-WW1 England, and the end of an era, and it prefigures the horrors and the cultural changes that the Great War will bring.
"Dane-geld" was the money you paid the Vikings to leave you alone, a bit like "protection" money in Brooklyn, or the way companies give money to Jesse Jackson. It's called "legal extortion". Horsefeathers remembered these lines of Kipling:
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and to say:— “Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you. We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we’ve proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane.
Indeed. And ultimately, after hundreds of years of raiding and pillage and rape and murder and destruction, the Danish Vikings, from Sven Forkbeard, to various Canutes, etc, ruled England for many years before the Norman Invasion in 1066.
My free-association to these thoughts about appeasing an enemy leads to an excellent and, for me, very influential book: Hannah Arendt's Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.I will not try to summarize all of the wisdom in this book, but one of her many points is that Eichman did not have horns - he was a bureaucrat who wanted to get ahead and please his superiors. An average schlemiel, you might say.
Part of the book refers to how the trusting and possibly overly-civilized, or innocent, Jews cooperated with German authorities. From an Amazon review by Egolf:
One of the most disturbing sections of the book begins on page 117 in which Miss Arendt gives a horrifying example that mass murders in German occupied Europe were done with the sanction of the victims. She explains that leaders of Jewish councils cooperated with German authorties in a triage effort in herding victims to the concentration camps. This section reveals what happens when "decent" people exert serious efforts to prove that they can obey the law even if the law means their own destruction. These comments are followed by similiar remarks on page 137 whereby Miss Arendt remarks, ...the odd notion, indeed very common in Germany, that to be law-abiding means not merely to obey the laws but to act as thought one were the legislator of the laws that one obeys. Hence the conviction that nothing less than going beyond the call of duty will do." These remarks partailly explain the subtitle of the book, A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL.
Yet, as depressing as this book is, Miss Arendt cites examples of rare courage in German occupied Europe during World War II. Miss Arendt cites the Danes who in effect said that they would no longer comply with German law, and a few Danes openly resisted efforts to arrest and convey Jews to concentration camps. This is an important part of the book in that it explains what can occur when petty minded bureaucrats meet with open defiance based on principle. Miss Arendt reveals what many thought was "toughness" was merely,... "a ruthless desire to comform at any price..."
Thinking about Arendt leads me to the famous 1974 Milgram Experiment, which demonstrated how ordinary people can be quickly led to depravity by following the rules and adhering to authority and civilization conformity pressures. Read the link, if you need a reminder. Nowadays, Political Correctness and Leftist Surrender are the main source of Peer Pressure.
That's enough for now. This isn't a lecture. You connect the dots. Or let us show you modern-day civilized, humanitarian, humble, sensitive submission - let Gateway do it for you, - in Denmark!!! - with pictures... These are not the Danes who rescued the Jews: these are the Danes who submit, by reflex, to aggression. We all have people like that.
Victims of 
Psychoanalytic theory isn't really very complicated. We only have three or four basic concepts, from which a myriad of fascinating ideas derive.
Real Irishmen like to have a pint at the pub on the way to work. Every day, not just on the Feast of St. Patrick, which is not a big event in Ireland. To make it breakfast, the barman stirs in one or two raw eggs. Then a fellow is ready for work.
How do nations create wealth? Liberating people's minds, and rewarding effort and ambition, seem to be key factors. Coyote at Coyote Blog plays Adam Smith and offers this:
Most well-organized families already have their summer family trips planned, but all we have is our options nailed down. 
A solid and enjoyable summary of the music of The Beatles, from 
