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.
Actively-managed equity accounts are widely considered a rip-off for the muppets. I am not rich enough to get into hedge funds, but I'd like to be because those smart folks can do far more than I can, hedging currencies, national economies, sovereign debt, etc. while the average Joe like me is stuck with mass market retail products.
I like to have money, and enjoy the concept of making money in markets while busy at my day job. I keep spare cash in a Vanguard bond fund, while my IRA is miscellaneous but mostly Vanguard funds with a focus on proven income-producing equities and some balanced funds plus some good (legal, of course) stock tips, and some cash for the next market crash, locked and loaded. I control my IRA.
I also have substantial debt in the form of a low-interest but fairly large mortgage which I intend to keep as long as I am able to work. As I have calculated it, keeping a mortgage is a net gain for me.
Most people want capital-preservation above all, but if you want risk to make real money in markets, do what monkeys do and use your crystal ball and pick the right stocks instead of indexes indices and buy low, sell high. After all, funds dilute gains. So hire a monkey.
What do y'all do with your spare cash and with your long-term savings?
Let's hope not. Actually the article is a critique of behavioral genetics, aka evolutionary psychology, as much as anything else.
Humans are a highly-sexualized sort of ape, with no estrus period as most mammals and even monkeys have (except for the "great apes" of which we are one). It's difficult if not impossible to determine what sexual behaviors are "natural" for humans because mental activity, fantasy, relationships, and culture are such major parts of being human. After all, rape, murder, theft, violence, pedophilia, etc. are all sort-of "natural" for humankind, and there are cultures in which monogamy is considered a mental illness or a form of infantile behavior. It's safe to say that the Western bourgeois ideal of lifelong monogamous marriage and the nuclear family is very far from "natural" despite being fairly effective for child-rearing and overall life stability in Western culture.
It also is safe to say that humans are the horniest of animals and, with our capacity for wild imagination and strange (by animal terms) sexual desires and fantasies, a rather insane species.
Mokita is a word in the Kivila language, spoken on the largest of the Papua New GuineanTrobriand IslandsKiriwina, which describes the concept of "truth we all know but agree not to talk about."
As the Thought Police gain influence, the amount of mokita increases.
“For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning—to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. Our reason has become an instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life. Philosophy itself has shrunk under the influence of our weakness for instrumentality…”
The only thing worse than a pugnacious atheist is a pugnacious atheist who has a fetish for scientism. In that light, Dawkins’ bemoaning of childhood fiction actually makes sense. Devoting an inordinate amount of his life’s work to empirics makes any man coarse. Facts are blunt and stark, while imagination can be bright and stirring. The greatest works of art and architecture produced by man weren’t the product of cold calculation. They were inspired by a volition that doesn’t take cues from controlled laboratory experiments.
Here's a good piece on scientism as a superstition.
If Ives’s music often falls flat in performance, does that make the music less great? For most people the answer is unequivocally yes. But it’s worth contemplating the example of three piano sonatas, all written within fifteen years of the premiere of Ives’s “Concord,” by three of the most important American composers: Carter, Barber, Copland. Each of these pieces attempts an epic statement, fusing popular music with the complexities of modernism. Each is more expertly composed than the “Concord”—better crafted, more transparent, more pianistic—and eminently practical in concert. But Ives’s sonata towers over them all, despite or because of its doubts, sweeping past the fine points of constructing a musical work to address the nature and purpose of music itself. And that is the injustice of art; sometimes all the craft in the world is trumped by someone with something more important to say.
There is nothing new there in the age-old nature-nurture game. Does it really need saying that people who are more closely related likely have more traits in common? "Race" and "ethnicity" are just words for common ancestry, like "distant cousins." Early humans spread around the earth, and bred with others in their own neighborhoods just like Darwin's finches. Naturally, differences happened but not to the extent of new species, but enough so that people recognize their cousins.
AA is a wonderful thing which has helped countless people, and countless patients of mine.
I have no idea why our internet friend thinks that we shrinks do not appreciate it immensely: Does AA Work? In fact, I have often said that there should be an AA for non-alcoholics. Its general approach could help people grow up even if they aren't drunks.
As we have posted in the past, the format of AA was based on a Methodist program for personal spiritual growth, and spiritual and emotional maturity.
"What is lost in lucidity is gained in the strange poetic power of association that is Shakespeare's most striking poetic feature. His mind leaps sideways - and, by implication, in cross-referenced, associative language-leaping allusiveness - as often as it bulls forward to a goal. It is the very opposite of what Orwell and the like supposed to be the special virtue of English: plain-pudding simplicity and clarity."
Good friends have a daughter who will be starting at the University of Alabama this fall. The brilliant (math, physics, dance, violin - not Asian but with 800s.) kid would only apply to southern state colleges. South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama. She wanted a cultural change, a complete change of pace from Yankeeland. Good for her. Each one she applied to offered her a full scholarship to go, but the parents honorably refused any scholarships, feeling that they should go to those in need. (This family was all set to pay for Harvard, so they got a windfall even without the scholarship offer.)
Mom told me that the kid had already lined up her roommates via facebook, that she had already found sponsors for the sororities she wanted, and that she had already gotten her football package online. Mom told me she said something like "Honey, this is supposed to be school. Are you planning on studying anything?" This was not the kid she knew.
"I'll worry about the details when I get there, Mom. I'm gonna be a physics major and a performing arts minor. I know what I'm doing, so don't worry about me."
Tuscaloosa. I enjoy seeing what kids will do. It will change her life, probably for the better.
Change is good, or people get in ruts. Over many years, I think we finally found our right rut. It's about friends, interesting activities, a comfy-enough home to sleep in and in which to hang some pictures, a couple of horses and a barn, and a church home. It takes many years, many adventures and a few failures, to find one's right happy rut for the long haul. Even then, who knows what might come next? For me, I plan to work until I cannot.
Elliot Rodger was not a social problem. He was not a gun culture. He was not a national anything. He was an individual and individuals bear responsibility for their own actions.
The left is expert at removing responsibility from individuals and assigning it to the culture at large. Every murder is a failure of society. And society fails every murderer, they insist. We are all murderers because we own guns or didn't vote for the right politicians who would have allocated more money to mental health treatment, school counseling or midnight basketball.
It's quite a detailed story in The New Yorker about an attempt at top-down education reform by the experts: SCHOOLED - Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools. They got an education.
Yes, they got an education but nobody else did. That was $100 million thrown into the trash.
Over the past year, Mrs. BD and I have been listening to NPR in the car, and I have been back to reading The New Yorker every week after boycotting them for many years.
Their appeal is their substantive content, not their political messaging. When it comes to news or politics, just mute the radio or skip the article to protect the heart from sudden, dangerous blood pressure rises. They each still have lots of other interesting stuff for the enjoyment of the effete and the elite like us Yankee rednecks.
Do I feel that NPR or PBS should exist? No, not unless entirely listener- or other-sponsored.
Way I think about it, Maggie's Farm has interesting stuff too, besides politics.
We attended a family funeral on Saturday down in NJ. All of the vets' graves had flags. There were so many that it looked like a field of flags. The husband, my uncle-in-law, of the sweet gal who died was in the Normandy invasion, and in the war until it ended. By the end of the war, he was one of four surviving from his original platoon. Still in good shape. His war stories are remarkable - taking a castle! I sat next to a cousin-in-law USAF Col. at the funeral lunch. Vietnam Vet. All Irish, all warm and amusing - and all fairly sober.
We link Dalrymple's stuff all the time. It's time to let you know about his new book, Threats of Pain and Ruin.
I learned, from the Amazon blurb, some things about him that I did not know:
Theodore Dalrymple is a former prison doctor and psychiatrist. He has been arrested as a spy in Gabon, been sought by the South African police for violating apartheid, visited the site of a civilian massacre by the government of Liberia, concealed his status as a writer for fear of execution in Equatorial Guinea, infiltrated an English communist group in order to attend the World Youth Festival in North Korea, performed Shakespeare in Afghanistan, smuggled banned books to dissidents in Romania, been arrested and struck with truncheons for photographing an anti-government demonstration in Albania and crossed both Africa and South America using only public transportation. He is also the author of more than two dozen books and innumerable essays.
If only half of that were true he'd be in line to be my next shrink - after I wear out my current confessore.
1. The world-wide present and historical range of the Moose (known as Elk in Europe and Asia). I did not know that they used to be in Rhode Island, nor did I know that there were any left in Colorado. In Maine and NH, they are all over the place and moving south due to global warming. Wolves and hunters are needed.
The dirty secret about the "pure" golf game is the amount of cheating, not just in tournaments - amateur tournaments mainly - but also in everyday play.
So here are my questions:
1. Do you cheat? Do you play with people who cheat?
2. If so, how? Is a mulligan cheating?
3. How prevalent, or accepted, do you think it is?
"Nine out of ten doctors would not recommend anyone go into medicine today," the headline of an online news post read.
An article in Forbes Magazine last month cited the selfless dedication physicians bring to the practice of medicine caring only for the well being of their patients. Both statements are gross exaggerations. While many doctors are unhappy with the changes in medical practice they are not retiring in droves, and while most doctors care a great deal for their patients there are also those who care more about their compensation. Certainly more of the older generation of practitioners, my generation of physicians, have been stunned by the changes that have occurred over the past 25 years in the delivery of health care, but also by the loss of a sense of power doctors once had. The axis of physician, nurse, patient is now a mosaic which includes many other "providers" not anticipated twenty years ago.
One of the first changes was to remove the doctor from his pinnacle by calling him (his/him will stand for both genders in the interest of brevity) a "health care provider." Thus, medical care deliverers became like Dr. Pepper drinkers, "I'm a Pepper, she's a Pepper, wouldn't you like to be a Pepper too?" We groused about it but only a few of us saw the dark clouds on the western horizon, managed care was approaching. Up until that time the community hospital was basically a doctor's club complete with private dining room. As care became more complicated and sophisticated - intensive care units and CAT scans did not exist in the 1960s when I was an intern and resident - the hospital became more of an independent institution that could serve patients with its own staff to service physician referrals.
When it comes to sex, will humans ever be 
From 
We link Dalrymple's stuff all the time. It's time to let you know about his new book, 
The dirty secret about the "pure" golf game is the amount of cheating, not just in tournaments - amateur tournaments mainly - but also in everyday play.
"Nine out of ten doctors would not recommend anyone go into medicine today," the headline of an online news post read.