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.
No pain, no gain? This is about gratifications and pleasures earned in the completion of things one has the impulse to avoid which require possibly unpleasant exertion, effort or discipline in contrast to easy, unearned gratifications.
The capacity to delay gratification is considered a measure of maturity and life-competence, but we all struggle with something ever day. The enemies are "I don't feel like it" or "I feel like it." In other words, self-indulgence. The enemy is us.
The earned gratifications of accomplishment tend to feel better afterwards; unearned gratifications (eg food, booze and drugs, shopping, trips and vacations, watching TV, romantic affairs, surfing the web, etc, etc.) tend to feel good while doing but often worse after because they are easy pleasures or cheap thrills which have costs which are often out of proportion to meaningful gains.
I'll confess some of my personal routine challenges, some trivial and some not:
- Getting to church - hate to dress and drag us there on Sunday morning, but always glad we went - The gym and/or painful ("Feel the burn") exercising. No pain, no gain. - house cleaning (I don't mind doing laundry though - thank God for electricity) - Paperwork, paying bills, and tax prep - Facing/doing scary or confrontational things - eg "difficult conversations" - Dieting - Calling Mom when I have nothing to talk about - throwing a dinner party or cocktail party - Studying things you need to know but aren't interested in - giving up wine for Lent - going to the doctor or dentist - boat cleaning - social events where you don't know anybody - but then you meet interesting people - meeting with estate planners, revising the will - getting a kid through college - attending professional meetings - weddings (boring except for the families) and wakes/funerals (difficult to face, for me)
What's on your list of things you feel like avoiding, but feel good after you do them?
- Thomas Sowell loves Amy Chua's “The Triple Package”. Who knew that Nigerian immigrants did so well?
- Krauthammer's Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics. I am halfway through it, and it is a delight. Not much politics in it, but lots of life, with Charles' impeccable prose. He writes pretty well about baseball, which is one measure of a writer in my view.
- Our friend did a brief trailer for his book about Ethiopian kids in Israel, Sheba and Solomon's Return:
A 1965 picture of the psychedelic rock band which eventually became Pink Floyd includes their original lead guitarist, Rado Klose (second from the right). Rado left the band shortly after this picture was taken, before the name change and growth of the band's popularity.
Rado was born in Cambridge in 1945, his father a refugee from Nazi Germany. He was studying architecture and science when he met Syd Barrett and Roger Waters. He joined them, along with Nick Mason and Richard Wright, to perform under a variety of band names. He was less interested in rock, enjoyingjazz and blues. He was also a serious student and chose to leave the band to pursue his studies. He is believed to have been one of their most talented members. Clearly having an artistic streak, he followed his interests into photography.
He became an acclaimed photographer, and some of his work is available online now. His guitar work is available on two recorded tracks which are available, a cover of Slim Harpo's I'm a King Bee and the original Lucy Leave when the band was called The Tea Set. These often appear on Pink Floyd bootlegs. Klose remained close to his friends in the music community, occasionally working on some albums in the 2000's.
“The devil is endlessly ingenious, and sex is his favorite subject,” Tolkien insisted. “He is as good every bit at catching you through generous romantic or tender motives, as through baser or more animal ones.” Thus, Tolkien advised his young son, then 21, that the sexual fantasies of the 20th century were demonic lies, intended to ensnare human beings. Sex was a trap, Tolkien warned, because human beings are capable of almost infinite rationalization in terms of sexual motives. Romantic love is not sufficient as a justification for sex, Tolkien understood.
Taking the point further, Tolkien warned his son that “friendship” between a young man and a young woman, supposedly free from sexual desire, would not remain untroubled by sexual attraction for long. At least one of the partners is almost certain to be inflamed with sexual passion, Tolkien advised. This is especially true among the young, for Tolkien believed that such friendships might be possible later in life, “when sex cools down.”
My wife and I watched "Philomena" last night. It's an excellent film with top-notch acting, an engaging story and poignant humor.
The story lays bare difficulties which face humanity on many physical and spiritual levels - love, anger, acceptance and forgiveness.
I was displeased with Stephen Frears' generalized and broad attacks on the Catholic faith. While I'm not a regular practitioner, I am certain I have a better understanding than he does of what it means to be, and act, Catholic.
His broadsides against the Church and God should have been directed at individuals within the Church itself, or the misunderstandings of the nature of God. Instead he engaged a series of stereotypical and repetitive misconceptions which are common. His most egregious being a comparison of God to terrorists by discussing how many people died in an earthquake in Turkey. Getting past this requires an understanding this is a critical part of developing the story, however acidic the commentary employed.
To Frears' film-making credit, Philomena comes across as a truly great person - devout, loving, and understanding what being Catholic really means, despite having had to deal with great tragedy and hardship. Her difficulties often were by the hand of individuals who called themselves tools of God.
She epitomizes all that is good and right in the human condition - making few demands of anybody, finding great joy in life, and forgiving those who wronged her, intentionally or otherwise. She recognizes her shortcomings and errors, and accepts them for what they are. She pushes on through life bravely, assured in her relationship with God and her faith. As Stephen Frears' character attempts to snarkily put her down, her 'ignorance' instead puts him in his place and he comes to learn that despite being a respected public personality with a broad arc of learning, he still has much to learn from people he holds in low regard.
I recommend this film, because it is great in many ways, and has only one very bad flaw that is necessary to the story, yet is overcome by the uplifting nature of the main character.
Connecticut Shotgun Manufacturing Co. builds fine firearms in the state which is historically known for firearms. They also sell guns from other manufacturers, and have a cool store in New Britain, CT.
Pic is of their fancy shooting/travel bags. Nice stuff, but too fancy for me. I carry ammo and gear in a waxed canvas bag. I'd take one as a gift, though. When you think about it, a woman's pocketbook is really a shooting bag adapted for women's uses.
...with the advent of the railroad, bags were about to experience a revolution. In 1843, there were nearly 2000 miles of railway lines in Great Britain. As more people traveled by train and more women became more mobile, professional luggage makers turned the skills of horse travel into those for train travel, and soon the term “handbag” emerged to describe these new hand-held luggage bags. Indeed, many of the top names of today's handbags got their start as luggage makers (in contrast to the previously made purses and pouches which were made by dressmakers). For example, Hermes bags were founded in 1837 by Thierry Hermes, a harness and saddle maker, while Louis Vuitton was a luggage packer for the Parisian rich. Modern handbags still allude to luggage with their pockets, fastenings, frames, locks, and keys.
Pi is a cosmic mystery. How about home-made Pizza Pi instead? Photo is how I like my Pi - not exactly round according to Pi but rustic, and slightly burnt in an outdoor wood-burning oven. Goat cheese, pancetta, a little asparagus? Why not?
With some beer. Note that they are using Pi to try to find that missing airplane. Pi is handy.
I have written many times here about food fetishists. I am not referring to people with diagnosed eating disorders, just to people with neurotic concerns about "healthy food" and the silly wealthy people who go to Whole Foods.
"Healthy food" cannot be defined, because humans evolved as opportunistic omnivores. We can and will thrive on anything and everything we can stuff into our gaping pie holes. Americans and Europeans are the most over-nourished people on earth, as is most of the Western-influenced prosperous world.
"Food Studies"? Yes, with a minor in beer and pizza after classes. Unless you need to lose fat, have a pepperoni pizza and a beer, then some ice cream, find some other more productive interests to think about, and you'll do just fine in life. I regret informing you, as a physician, that "You are not what you eat." It's just too bad that life is not that easy.
In the Western world, too much nutrition is the biggest concern. It's now termed a "First World Problem" - How little of what will I eat for supper?
As the author notes, at least the artist isn't calling for state intervention. However, this mindset is why I think so many artists have messed up political views. Childish, immature, idealistic views - these all lend themselves to producing art, at times. He chose a profession, then got angry when people liked what he made and were willing to pay him for it. But he couldn't produce for them. So he broke his contract.
High Price is the harrowing and inspiring memoir of neuroscientist Carl Hart, a man who grew up in one of Miami’s toughest neighborhoods and, determined to make a difference as an adult, tirelessly applies his scientific training to help save real lives.
Young Carl didn't see the value of school, studying just enough to keep him on the basketball team. Today, he is a cutting-edge neuroscientist—Columbia University’s first tenured African American professor in the sciences—whose landmark, controversial research is redefining our understanding of addiction.
In this provocative and eye-opening memoir, Dr. Carl Hart recalls his journey of self-discovery, how he escaped a life of crime and drugs and avoided becoming one of the crack addicts he now studies. Interweaving past and present, Hart goes beyond the hype as he examines the relationship between drugs and pleasure, choice, and motivation, both in the brain and in society. His findings shed new light on common ideas about race, poverty, and drugs, and explain why current policies are failing.
Well, we got back from the Caribbean recently and it is still damn cold up here in New England. It is dead winter in this record cold year. Bought 15 bags of Home Depot Black Forest mulch this morning for the front garden, and they are all frozen solid and the garden is under a foot of ice.
This tune is in memory of global warming if anybody is old enough to remember that last big crisis requiring our betters to run our lives for us. "If we weren't all crazy we'd all go insane." Can anybody not like Jimmy? It's actually Changes in Latitudes, for starters -
I swim at my own risk routinely. I drink a couple of Coronas with limes, then jump off the boat in the middle of Nantucket Sound to swim with the Bluefish and the sharks. Good fun. I also will drive my boat through tough summer squalls just for the challenge and thrill of it.
I was thinking about my post a week or so ago about federally-subsidized flood insurance, and why it provoked so much response. I am not insensitive to the pain, chaos, and tragedy of seeing one's home damaged or destroyed. However, I want to focus on the policy issue which, in effect, enables - encourages - these things to happen.
Why? Because it seems to me that it's a provocative issue not so much about flooding but because it is related to the proper role of government vis a vis the private sector and the power of nature - and of human-nature - itself.
Government interventions usually distort markets, sometimes in the ways government policy hopes they will and, very frequently, with unintended (but predictable if you have half a brain) consequences. The Army Corps of Engineers has spent huge bucks over the years on Mississippi levees to prevent flooding. As a result, Delta farmlands in states like Mississippi no longer receive their regular dose of nutrients, flooding is worse when it does occur, and the environmental and property damage to the Louisiana delta is ongoing. It's entirely predictable. The levees prevent the mighty river from using its flood plains - and much of New Orleans was constructed, foolishly, but they didn't care at the time - below sea level.
Before LBJ passed federally-subsidized flood insurance, construction in flood-prone areas was limited to those who were able to obtain (expensive, and rightly-so) private flood insurance, or people who didn't care. People who built on beachfront, near marshes or river flood plains, tornado alley, etc., expected the worse to occur sooner or later, and took the risk or bought insurance on the free market. Before then (and before wetlands protection laws), construction on wetlands landfill (now illegal) or near beaches and rivers was at your own risk, mostly. "Acts of God" were excluded from homeowner's insurance without additional riders and naturally, flood-prone areas also had lower property values to reflect the risk and the occasional unpleasantness.)
Federally-subsidized flood insurance (designed to subsidize developers doing risky water-proximate construction) has had the effect of encouraging reckless behavior and, at the same time, enabled the development of fragile and ever-changing water-related habitats that would have been better left alone.
But what does the developer care? He builds, sells, profits, and leaves. Eventually, water goes wherever it wants to go and every human knows that. The consequence of living near water is that Nor'easters like Sandy, hurricanes, etc. are more damaging to property than they have have been historically in the US. Historically, for examples, Sandy Hook, New Jersey, waterfront, the Rockaways, and the North Carolina barrier beaches had, at most, rustic shacks which washed away with every big storm.Now, people build permanent residences and complain to the government when they get washed away or flooded out.
Risk is incentivized by not paying free market rates. Risky life choices (eg smoking, living in a forest-fire area, DUIs, drug abuse, having a home without fire alarms and fire-extinguishers, sky-diving, having a home with antiquated electric, living 50 miles from a fire department, piloting small airplanes, mountain-climbing, driving race cars, etc etc) have a market cost reflecting the risk taken and most of the time they do when people chose to buy insurance. Actuaries are statistical geniuses and very good at calculating and costing-out the risks of almost everything people do - which is why they make big bucks. In free markets, you can insure anything if you want to. Lloyd's will even insure an opera diva's larynx.
My solution to federally-subsidized flood insurance is similar to what my solution would be to many government-induced unintended negative consequences: phase government out of the way entirely and let free markets and nature work their will. Much misery and catastrophe would be eliminated that way in the long run. It's not about compassion. It's about facing reality honestly.
(NB: I am opposed to government wildfire suppression so I guess this makes me an environmental radical, or something heartless. The local fire department is fine with me, however, so you cannot call me an anarchist. I also oppose the mortgage interest tax deduction. Just a covert subsidy to the construction biz.)
Being a parent is difficult. I enjoyed every second of raising my kids so far, including the difficult times, the fights, the punishments. The rewards are far greater than the stressful moments.
Yet a case like this seems - I say seems, because we can't ever know all the details - to be indicative of many things that are wrong in American society today. Entitled kids? Maybe, that's very common. Abusive parents? We've seen that, so it's possible. Litigation to solve something which should be worked out privately? I have no idea why this is in court, but there are plenty of cases in the courts which have no reason being heard. These people need counseling, not lawyers.
I believe in a 'my house, my rules' environment. Children, even some young adults over 18, often don't understand why rules exist, don't want to know why they exist, and want only what they want. Furthermore, once a child turn 18, and particularly if they decide to leave home permanently - for any reason - they have to accept responsibility for themselves. As a parent, if my child left on good terms, I would offer and provide assistance when it was needed and requested. If they left on bad terms and immediately made demands on me and the rest of the family, let's just say things may not work out as well. The child should expect and understand why that might happen. If they were willing to take steps to remedy the situation, they would always be met with welcome arms.
I can't say Rachel Canning is entitled, I don't know. The superficial information seems to indicate she is and simply isn't happy living within her parents' somewhat strict governance. But that's part of the the parent/child dynamic. I don't put limitations on who my boys can hang out with or date, but I have had long, and often difficult, discussions with them about the types of kids they spend time with. Other parents take a much more active role. We all have a different approach, and it's my opinion that the house makes the rules regardless of how I make my own house rules. If the child lives in the house and relies on the parents, then that is part of the package.
I can see a situation where Rachel may deserve something, but it would have to related to abuse above and beyond just tough parenting. She makes some allegations, but apparently has no evidence. There seems to be plenty of evidence of bad manners and lack of respect. I can't see her winning this suit. Whether she does or not, the concept of being 18 and 'owed' something by your parents is far from assured. As parents, they did spend 18 years of time and money getting her ready to go out on her own, and Rachel seems pretty qualified to do that based on her performance in school. On the other hand, the ACA does require we insure our kids until they are 26 (as one commenter noted, if they are claimed on parents' taxes), so maybe coddling is the government's way of providing for the next generation.
Bart Pronghammer walked into the hotel room and knitted his brow at the sight of a naked woman with breasts like regulation volleyballs.
“Let’s have sex,” she mused matter-of-factly.
A few paragraphs later they’re all done, and the male reader, having invested maybe ninety seconds of his time, can put the book down and go back to watching SportsCenter.
Recently, while Bird Dog was lounging in the Caribbean, I was sent to do a presentation at a conference in Palm Desert, California. Since I was a featured speaker, the conference was paying for my hotel, and as these things are typically boondoggles held at high-end resorts, I asked my wife to join me and she reluctantly agreed. It took a tremendous amount of arm-twisting, two lines of text at a minimum.
My presentation meant a day in a ballroom with 200 of my closest industry competitors. It provided a great opportunity to discuss issues at the heart of my business and I managed to deliver a 30 minute presentation in what seemed like 5 minutes. I'm still learning to present well, though I was pleased to hear my work referenced several times by the speakers who followed me.
Once I got past the fun part, it was 'boondoggle on' and the wife and I availed ourselves of the surrounding region. We took a bike tour of Palm Springs, headed out to Joshua Tree National Park and did an hour's hike up Ryan Mountain for some spectacular views. I highly recommend a visit to Joshua Tree, if you're ever in the area. It has a beauty which is very hard to describe. It may not be for everyone. I found it fascinating. I also wanted to visit the Salton Sea, but time didn't permit.
As we were preparing to leave, my wife noticed an article about Mid-Century Modern architecture in a local magazine. What caught her eye was a house owned by the Kaufmanns, a family I recently wrote about. Apparently, this family was rather innovative in their tastes. Successful in the business of retailing, they expanded the American cultural landscape by contracting with ground-breaking architects, in this case Richard Neutra. Success really does breed success. Their home in Palm Springs is considered the premiere example of the Mid-Century Modern home.
We do not seem to have very many Olympics fans, or even TV-watchers, among our commenters here. However, the closing ceremony music was by Dimitri Zinovievich Tiomkin*, a Russian Jewish composer who emigrated to America and became one of the most distinguished and best-loved music writers of Hollywood. He won a hallowed place in the pantheon of the most successful and productive composers in American film history, earning himself four Oscars and sixteen Academy Awards nominations.
The music was composed for a movie celebrating independent capitalist values as they developed and matured over 25 years in rural Texas. The movie was Giant with Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean and Carol Baker. You can listen to some of the theme in the trailer below. Think Vlad Putin knows?
It's fascinating how crowded Everest is becoming these days, with queues of mountain tourists for the rope lines. The highways are all mapped out, ladders installed, ropes installed, sherpas hired, etc., so it's almost like a rich man's chilly Disney World.
The medical part - and the risk of bad weather - seem to be the greatest challenges. First World Problems, if you will, because nobody needs to do this. However, if it is made too safe, where's the credit?
As with the Olympics, I think it's wonderful that some people want to try these sorts of adventures in life, but I do not admire the amateur tourists. Good film:
From Bottum: The Post-Protestant Ethic and Spirit of America - The new elite class of America is the old one: America’s mainline Protestant Christians in both the glory and the annoyingness of their moral confidence and spiritual certainty. They just stripped out the Christianity along the way.
He begins:
Beginning with the abolition of slavery, the bitter battles of American political life have often been fought over spiritual issues. It’s hard to know, for example, what else Prohibition was about. And yet the great moralizing and spiritualizing of American politics feels different these days, more complete, more all-encompassing. It’s as though our public life were not a political stadium in which spiritual footballs sometimes appear; rather the field itself has become religious. Our public life is now a supernatural game and our purely political concerns have been reduced to nothing more than footballs with which we happen to play that public game of spiritual redemption.
Our anxious age often seems a moment more tinged by its spiritual worries than anytime in America since perhaps the 1730s. The nation’s unconscious spirituality is splashed across our supposedly secular life.
To say that math has to be useful is like 
I have written many times here about food fetishists. I am not referring to people with diagnosed eating disorders, just to people with neurotic concerns about "healthy food" and the silly wealthy people who go to Whole Foods.
