Wednesday, April 29. 2009
Does aptitude matter at all? Does ability matter? Does anything matter, except skin tone diversity? As far as I can tell, the anti-test movement in edn is all about skin tone.
Tests are designed to discern and to objectively measure ability and knowledge, to - and here's the word - discriminate the competent from the less so. Crazy thing is that the SAT was introduced precisely to provide objective measures to eliminate favoritism and to reward merit.
About beauty and kitsch and Scruton's new book on Beauty. One quote:
...if nearly everyone likes it, how bad can it be? "Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations," said Harold Rosenberg, the great art critic. Milan Kundera argued, "No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition." And they were writing before the appearance of "reality" television, which repackages kitschy old conventions of popular drama as public competition, bringing to "real" people the humiliation and cruelty traditionally endured by imaginary losers in mass-culture fiction.
Photo: Flamingo decoys are still available, here.
I would say the Catholics win this round.
Tuesday, April 28. 2009
 The news mills are ginning up yet another medical crisis storm these days in an effort to pave the way for gummint medical care by the same good folks who run the DMV and the post office. They seem to imagine a problem with cost, access, and insurance. Maybe we are a nation of crybabies, because we have the best medical care in the world with which to pamper our so-called precious selves.
It's time we got beyond that self-love, and cared about the Greater Good. I have a few simple, rational, Utilitarian solutions.
Cost: Cost is driven by technology and modern pharmacology, cancer treatment, crocks (people obsessed with their health), gomers ("gomers go to ground"), and futile, guilt-driven end-of-life treatment for annoying old or sick relatives. The cost of American medical care can be dramatically reduced by forbidding all cancer treatment other than Oxycontin and at-home 10-gallon morphine pumps, all medical treatment for those over 57 (the children are our future!), all CT and MRI scans, all blood tests, and all medicines other than friendly, holistic, herbal organic ones. No more vaccinations - they cause Autism. No more antibiotics - everybody knows that they make people sick. Eliminate Dermatology (just stay out of the sun, people). Eliminate Opthalmology (bad eyesight is from masturbation - it's your own fault). Eliminate Psychiatry (mental illness is socio-political mind control). Eliminate Urology (do you want a #3 gauge tube stuck up your urethra?). Eliminate Surgery - it is physical assault on comatose victims. Eliminate Neurology - it's just nerves.
Access: Doctors are like waterfront trade unions: they limit their numbers to keep their payments high enough to join country clubs, to buy boats, and to take vacations. My idea: anybody who gets a C or better in Organic Chem is automatically admitted to a government medical school. Lots of good, caring people are weak in math and chem and bio and stuff, but that's who we need more of. My medical school flunk-out rate was 18%: what a waste of talent. Plus there are too many Jews and Asians in medicine anyway, and too few people of color or of gender identity diversity. So, with this increase in the numbers of docs, fees could go down to $5 per office visit and the docs who don't like it can open dry cleaning shops, cigar shops and wine shops like they do in Canada.
Insurance: Medical insurance is a dumb idea. Why expect your neighbor to pay your medical bills when they will be so low under my plan anyway? They will be cheaper than your garbage pick-up, your newspaper subscription, your cigarette costs, your car payment or your monthly payment for your big screen TV. (Did you ever notice how nobody complains about the cost of their TVs, computers, or Life Insurance?) Or just save your money if you want and die quietly without complaint, dude, and make space for the next generation. Too many people on the planet and, let's face it, life isn't all it's cracked up to be anyway. A vale of tears and toil, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. What's the big deal about death? Didn't your parents teach you that life is a bitch?
Monday, April 27. 2009
 It looks like our Dylanologist will be moving back north to Yankeeland - to New Haven, of all places. One of his great-grandfathers grew up in Woodbridge, and one of his gramps is a retired Yale prof.
With a new bride, too. Hope he will be able to find time to write more for us.
(Between law school, building stone walls and rebuilding kitchens, he has been truant here at Maggie's. If he doesn't get back on the job, that large monthly check, which is his share of the overly generous RTC donation we receive for mindlessly echoing Repub talking points, will stop coming to him.)
Ya gotta go South to find them high-quality brides. But everybody knows that.
Photo: Got dimples? The Dyl on a water taxi on Lago Maggiore last summer.
Sunday, April 26. 2009
 Terrific stuff. Cheap, too. We have had Crab Cake recipe wars here recently, but here are some more simple recipes. I put no flavorings in the cakes, because I like the main taste to be the tender, succulent, subtle crabmeat, which is why my favorite food in the world is sauteed soft-shelled crab.
Except maybe Halibut with capers, or Shad Roe with bacon, or Bluefin Tuna belly just seared on the grill, or rare roast beef with horseradish and Yorkshire pudding, or Shepherd's Pie, or barbecued short ribs with cornbread, or Chicken Pot Pie, or black bean soup with jalapenos and mashed potatoes, or plain mashed potatoes, or a real Gumbo made by my Louisiana pal, or a Woodcock dumpling with gibier sauce, black truffle, and Porcini mushrooms, or ...
Saturday, April 25. 2009
Starting to write about the US debate over torture, I first turned to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary. The word derives from the Latin, to twist. Three current definitions are offered: 1. to cause anguish of body or mind; or more drastically, 2. to inflict intense pain to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure; and 3. “straining” as in distortion or overrefinement of a meaning or an argument.
That definition allows greater clarity about the positions being argued about torture.
The Geneva Conventions apply to restricting the first definition unduly against enemy state soldiers and civilians. The applicability to nonstate terrorists is not addressed. Thus, the Bush administration labeled them “enemy combatants” and tried mightily – in the midst of great uncertainty, confusion, danger, and rapidly changing events -- to blend civilized restraints with practical considerations of gaining intelligence.
The Associated Press report of the speech by the very liberal President of the Israeli Supreme Court at Princeton a few days ago highlighted the problem facing Western governments, “that one of the main challenges the court faces is that international law has yet to fully adapt to modern terrorist threats.” This learned lesson is important from someone widely hailed by the Left for her other positions. Israel, like other parliamentary governments, does not have a Constitution like does the US, so its supreme court ranges more widely – and liberally -- in deciding right and wrong, legal and illegal. Israel, uniquely, sits on the frontline, within and without, facing existential terrorist attacks.
Israel has taken extensive measures to restrict its armed forces from breaching this elusive line between proper actions and excessively avoidable harm to civilians and to enemy combatants. In the US, the bipartisan Congressional remedy, led by John McCain, was to restrict our military. The argument is that our military does not have the necessary professional experience to apply extensive interrogation techniques, undue use undermines the order necessary to our military, and that leads to undermining both discipline and self-respect in energetically fighting for what is right.
The Bush administration went further in, pardon the pun, agonizing or torturing itself in defining restrictive conditions for the use of extensive interrogation techniques by CIA professionals upon leading captured terrorists.
None of this has satisfied those who take a more restrictive posture. There’s the camp, including some with dedication to fighting terrorists, who believe that a purist conception of Americans requires that we don’t use extensive interrogation techniques regardless of the possible benefits or risks. Then, there’s the camp that outright opposes US battles against terrorists, sometimes trying to mask their position with support conditional on impossible and impractical crippling hamstringing, borrowing from the self-righteousness of the first camp to distract from their own true priority. This camp is allied with a third camp, politicians whose primary motivation is to exploit the arguments for their own benefit. Democrats who, in the wake of 9/11’s awakening, supported or argued for extensive use of interrogation techniques in recognition of Americans’ expectations of firm resolve then denied and flip-flopped in their pursuit of power in unseating the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress. These Democrat politicians “strain”, the third definition of torture, in distortion or overrefinement of their argument, relying upon the idealistic or contorted arguments from the first two camps.
So, now, the Obama administration is hoisted by its own petard of its own most ardent supporters in confronting the practical needs to govern and to be held responsible for America’s security.
Those within the Obama administration who argued from experience and proper caution for moderation were overruled and selective release of documents and photos launched that seek to discredit the Bush administration’s efforts, and even criminalize policy. Opponents decry this as reckless self-endangerment and self-denigration of America, and call for fuller release of the record to demonstrate both the care taken and the needed survival results. Even the New York Times recognizes the danger but, true to its Obama-lean, couches it in the politician Obama’s self-interest: “Mr. Obama and his allies need to discredit the techniques he has banned. Otherwise, in the event of a future terrorist attack, critics may blame his decision to rein in C.I.A. interrogators.”
So, there we are, tortured for the past six years by tendentious and selfish attacks from within upon our ability to withstand and overcome tenacious, brutal and serious attacks from without. Now, due to the Obama administration’s irresponsibility, we face at least three more years of torture, of undue agony, that fruitlessly weakens our unity and resolve and exposes us all to potentially greater physical threats to our well-being and very lives. Our troops on the frontline are not bemused by this Obama administration recklessness with their safety and missions, nor should be the rest of us placed closer to frontline dangers as our intelligence professionals seek cover by retreating from their duties.
Friday, April 24. 2009
Our shrink friend Nathan, who has completed Aliyah in Israel, sends this reminiscence of his days working for the Indian Health Service, doing general practice including surgery and obstetrics - and anything else that was needed. Old-timey medicine.
Before replacing the sloughed skin on Mrs. R's arm, I had to find out why her forearm was raw to the muscle. New here among the Sioux, I am surprised to learn that my colleagues (and one ancient Roman Catholic always fiddling with her rosary) hadn't checked this elderly, chunky widow's blood sugar: diabetic, sure enough, never diagnosed. So, first things first: stabilize her blood sugars, treat the diabetes, and give proper antibiotics (for anaerobes and aerobes -- they missed this too), then when you see the shiny, glimmer of healthy tissue margins, go for a skin flap transplant.
The pharmacist was my surgical assistant; he was the brightest of the bunch, from N'orlins, La before the Flood, he couldn't get into med school, he said, but he was smart, hard-working and pleased to assist. He also ordered special hickory chips from N'orlins, La. to barbecue and made his own roux. It was then that I learned I loathed ochra, that slimy matrix it exudes.
Then how to unskin a lady was not to be straightforward as it was at the University hospital where I studied. The surgical suite -- well-endowed -- had not been used for years; surgery was sent eighty-miles up-road to Mobridge to the White hospital; none done here, except deliveries (which too often evolved into C-sections who had to be sent, ambulance screaming, up to Mobridge. One trip, the eternally-soused obstetrician kept his fist in the mother's vagina to keep the baby from popping out.
To unskin a forearm means to find a donor site from the inner thigh. Anesthesia needed for this and there was no anestheiologist, no nurse-anesthetist, even in the 1970's. I do double duty. First, a lumbar block to numb the donor site; second, a brachial plexus block -- in the armpit -- to numb the recipient, the naked forearm. Lumbars I had done many of: babies with possible meningitis; Southside Chicago girls in active labor, with no prenatal care and needing an urgent C-section. But, brachial plexus block was a never-done for me; remembered the anatomy, the complex twistings and routings within that armpit, like some noodling of telephone wires beneath the city streets, but never stuck a needle there. The night before surgery, I bone-up on my Netter's anatomy and hit the spot square-on the next day in the O.R.
Before hitting the OR, I had done several days debriding of the sloughed wound: fresh it must be to transplant the sod of skin. In the OR, flipped on her side, I slid into the vertebral space between L4 and 5; a bit lordotic pull by the nurses and I had a clear tunnel in. Then, flapped on her back, Mrs R. was ready. The thigh well scrubbed, Betadined, aproned, an oval hole isolating the site. Instruments we had. The strange loopy-scalpel to slice just-thick-enough epidermis and a touch if dermis to both "take" to the new site, yet leaving some dermis to heal-over the thigh; something like a large cheese knife the instrument looked. Forearm next. Her arm flung up like some lop-sided angel wing, I probed left-handed with two gloved fingers, then slid the massively long needle --- like from the cartoons -- in between the stretch of skin. Wait. Wait. Numbness without paralysis in the arm. First, a touch on the skin (for sensitive fibers); then a pinch with a forceps (for the pain C-fibers) and success.
 Laying the layers onto the site is much like laying sod; carefully, side by side, the edges trimmed to the wound shape. The "root" growing will take on its own, a pressure bandage holding the skin sod in place. A fine lawn it will hopefully be; like sodding around a putting hole -- it should look good and cover the ground. And after five or six days of brief peeks, it looks darn good.
But, Mrs. R. wants a pass to leave early. There will be a Sundance ceremony with several initiants, including, I learn later, Russel Means, wanted by the FBI for shooting three men on Rosebed reservation, down south. I explain, I plead in fact, that she can't rotate the arm; she must stay in hospital a week or so until we know healing has happened. Mrs. R. has donated two buffalo for eats at the ceremony and insists, politely, quietly, firmly, that she is going. Wakantanka, the Sioux god whose voice one hears shushing through the Black Hills, will protect her. She invites me.
Being invited was one thing; getting in another. I and Debby were the only washichus, white men, attending. While this was a Lakota Sioux ceremony, it had become politicized; other tribes, mostly the more militant ones, as far away as the Navajo, had sent "guards": thick-armed toughs with long, greasy black hair and their image of mean on their faces. The fellow who greeted us -- we had the red Fiat 128 in South Dakota -- commanded us out. A face like a slab of steak with two eyes embedded, he frisked me; looking for drugs and guns, he said. His compatriots searched the tiny Fiat's baggage, checked under the carriage, beneath the seats, glove compartment. When he turned to frisk Debby, I told him firmly, no way: I would turn around and he could explain to Mrs. R. why I was not admitted. Her name was a key to the lock that was his harshness. We were passed through.
I did not expect to be the only Washichu; thought other docs would be invited; learned later that my do-gooder colleagues who come to save the Indians are not so welcome. Already, I had dispensed with making morning rounds with them, as I tired and was irritated at the "religion" they spouted at bedside; told them I needed to round earlier.
We formed a large circle. Formed is not quite right. A circle was somehow formed by the few hundred there, centered by the cottonwood from which leather strops hung. Each strop was anchored with a bone hook -- from what animal I don't recall, perhaps antelope. The six piercees entered; I'm told by Mrs. R. that they had purified themselves in the wild for several days with fasting and water. The hooks are pierced into the pectoral muscle, not the skin, to hold more firmly; one on each side. as the men leaned back against the leather thongs, faces skyward, Cubist, uptilting tits were formed: this manly ceremony giving rise to a touch of woman. A moaning or humming was emitted by them by these men; also those in the circle, as the men stomped sidewise about, a dance they called it, in a hypnotic slowness. A timeless quality it felt.
Near the end, several men appear with massive shallow wooden bowls, face us in the circle and pass around the dried buffalo donated by Mrs. R.
She is called to near the center. A peace pipe is to be given to her for her generosity. As some chiefly type raises the pipe, his arms extended, palms upward, I realize, a touch shocked, that she will now rotate her arms upward to receive the peace pipe with both hands. I feel a belly clutch: will she tear the stitches?
Mrs. R. looks back at me afterwards; tosses a smile of reassurance. Thanks to Wakantanka the skin is fine, she explains.
One weekend, we go to the Black Hills, find a cabin, rest outside beneath a sky filled with more stars than I have ever imagined. I feel a sense of annoyance as I hear the rush of what sounds like highway traffic just beyond the ridge. Ridge top I look: no highway; it is Wakantanka speaking through the black pine.
It was the only time He has ever spoken around me.
Top photo: Sioux war party, 1870s?
Middle photo: Sioux warrior
Lower photo: Sioux village
 Does your town do recycling? If so, do you know where that stuff ends up? I mean where your junk really ends up.
I challenge any curious readers to find out what ultimately happens to the paper, plastics, beer cans, and glass that are put out so dutifully and virtuously for the garbagemen or recycling pick-ups in your town.
Two or three phone calls ought to do it. "It gets recycled" is not an adequate answer.
For extra credit: Try to find out what you or your town pays for this service, and who profits, if anyone, from your thoughtful donations of your precious garbage. And for your effort spent, as Roger says, "going through your garbage like a raccoon."
The subject picqued my interest because I have noticed that our garbagemen for the past year have been throwing the "recyling" paper and newspapers into their regular garbage truck. My guess is that most "recycled" stuff in the US ends up in landfills, but I do not know for sure. I do know that recycling glass is an economic absurdity, and that recycling plastics is too expensive to be worthwhile: it is just made from a 1/10 teaspoon of oil.
 Interesting link by our News Junkie last night re people who think of themselves as "good." That link led to Ryan Sager's The Al Gore's Fraggin' Giant Mansion Effect. A quote:
If you’re too-well-satisfied that you’re a good greenie, you’re more willing to cut yourself slack when you hurt the environment.
Call it the Al Gore’s Giant Fraggin’ Mansion Effect.
According to a new study in Psychological Science, humans engage in a process called “moral self-regulation.” Basically, we’re constantly calculating the trade-off between being able to see ourselves as good people and the cost of engaging in all that non-advantageous goodness.
You might expect that being prompted (primed) to think of yourself as a good person would make you more altruistic or moral — but, in fact, the exact opposite appears to be the case.
Read the whole thing. I have too many reactions to this to post briefly, but my first thought was that I have seen this many times. (See Obama's Earth Day flights burn 9000 gallons of fuel.) The process goes far beyond Greenieism. Many people play tricks with themselves in order to have their cake and eat it too.
The NJ summed it up perfectly: "They seem to think they get a pass because they're good." It reminds me of our recent QQQ from PJ O'Rourke: "Everybody wants to save the world but nobody wants to help Mom with the dishes."
It's important to most people to view themselves as virtuous. Cheap and easy virtuousness (recycling, donating to charities, volunteering, serving on committees, etc) is often used by people, consciously or unconsciously, to excuse or to compensate for their sins and crimes (eg not reporting cash income, cutting corners, patronizing massage parlors, spreading gossip, lying, etc). In my view, honest people wrestle with sin rather than playing the "moral self-regulation" game.
How many criminals have been described as "pillars of their community," "great guy, always kind and generous," "everybody loved him," "a great supporter of civic causes"? Lots of them.
I am not talking about guilt-driven "conspicuous virtue" here, like the cheating guys who bring their wives roses - I am talking about the secret compromises people make internally so as not to mentally suffer from their feelings of sinfulness and hypocrisy.
I could go on and on on this topic. More later, maybe.
Photo: John Gotti, the "Dapper Don," once a pillar of his community of Howard Beach, Queens, NYC, generous donor to his church and kids' sports, and an avid recycler with a deeply caring interest in the always-Green trash-hauling and recycling biz.
Thursday, April 23. 2009
Quicker than most expected, even those most critical of him, President Obama has unleashed his and his political party’s dénouement as grossly irresponsible and corrupt, to the unacceptable danger to the country’s survival.
His partial and skewed release of formerly secret documents about the interrogation of captured terrorists raises the prominence of the issue, and consequently of other major issues, in ways that very well may, and should, relegate the Democrat Party to the political hinterland for a generation.
1. The weight of informed and involved expertise on the interrogations is that they served to avoid additional terrorist attacks. The MSM’s trumpeting of the Obama partial releases makes it unavoidable for the MSM to provide the consumers of its media with the fuller story that will emerge.
2. Polls have consistently demonstrated the public is more in tune with better safe than sorry, and with little sympathy for applying Americans’ civil rights to foreign terrorists. The risks that Obama is taking with our security, and that of our allies, is not acceptable.
3. The Congressional Democrats, who have harped at every move taken by the Bush administration, own leadership were not only fully informed of those measures at the time but -- before seeking political advantage by unscrupulously reversing course – were advocates of even sterner measures. Continuing exposure of the formerly secret documents will further reveal their crass perfidy.
4. The increased exposure further highlights to the public the recidivism of many released from Guantanamo and the demurral to accept releasees by European countries critical of Guantanamo. This reinforces the conclusion that benign treatment of sworn enemies is suicidal.
5. Members of our intelligence community, and of formerly cooperating foreign intelligence agencies, will pull back from full exertion due to increased restrictions imposed and from reticence to be pilloried by leftists in power.
6. G-d forbid another significant terrorist attack occurs, particularly traceable to the denuding of vigilance among our intelligence agencies, the backlash will be harsh against those who crippled our security.
7. The cumulative impact of 1-5 above, and hopefully not even the 6th, sits on top of the unfolding and recognized debacle of the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats’ handling of the economic downturn to slip by intrusions -- into the economy, into health care, into taxation, into almost any facet of society it can -- that are destructive of our and future generations’ solvency and freedoms. The unease already claims a majority of citizens, and will become overwhelming.
8. The corruption endemic within the Washington and Chicago way of doing things, already evident to any observer, will be increasingly exposed as Democrats and their media allies lose their impunity to stifle full airings.
9. The willingness and arrogance of members of the Obama administration to invent ludicrous and extra-legal rationalizations for power grabs leads to more, as lies beget lies. The cover-ups and the overstepping of clearer legal red lines will create scandal after scandal.
10. In 2010, Republicans will increase their depleted power within Congress. The uniqueness of 2008 will be a memory, there won’t be a tail from a campaigning Obama, and centrists who regret straying into Democrat votes will be reduced. The hue against Obama and Democrat excesses and dangers will lead to more exposures.
The only reason that Obama and Congressional Democrats would avoid this dénouement is if one believes there are too few Americans with the intelligence to know up from down. The Democrats are counting on that poor bet.
Geez, Bird Dog. You kids these days with your newfangled Greek lyre and pan-flute noise music. I kick it old school -- Phoenecian, baby! 3400 years ago, the oldest known written melody was scratched out in cuneiform.
The text consists of: "Akkadian terms written in a Hurrianized manner and enscribed in Ugaritic Cuneiform script." (Big deal. According to our current Treasury Secretary, so are the instructions to TurboTax) You can read all about the tablet and the people that read Hurrian well enough to decipher it here. In the meantime, some robo-dweeb hep cat has tightened up his funky lyre and banged out that paean to Nikkal, the Moon Goddess:
Man-o-man, you're L7 if you didn't tap a toe to that one. Hurr Hurr Hurrian, baybee!
Monotonic music mainly, with lyre, drum, trumpet and flute, with different "modes" to evoke different states of mind. The ancient Greeks considered their music and lyrics to be central to who they were as a civilization, and, of course, to be a gift from the gods. As best I can tell, poetry (the lyrics) was never offered without accompanying music.
The group Melpomen recreates the ancient sounds from surviving fragments. (Samples of the music at the Amazon site.)
Wiki has a fine summary of ancient Greek music. Interesting to read that Plato (c 400 BC) complained about the modern music which defied old forms.
Image: Music lesson, c.460 BC, from this site about ancient Greek music.
Wednesday, April 22. 2009
I had lunch yesterday with a friend who runs a fund at Fidelity in Boston. She mentioned how many friends and acquaintances she has who had been - or had felt - wealthy but are now in desperate straits.
They had overpaid for grand houses in Cambridge and Chestnut Hill, and then did million-dollar renovations and extensions. They overpaid and leveraged themselves further by buying weekend houses in Maine, Nantucket, Westport or Marion. They bought expensive cars, and paid $300,000 on interior decorating. Wherever they travelled, they stayed at the Four Seasons unless they were golfing in Ireland or Scotland. They had had the sort of blind optimism that led them to believe that $1.5 million bonuses would continue forever. They saved next to nothing. And these are not stupid people: these are bright folks, Ivy League MBAs who know math - but unwise.
She told me about somebody like that in their late 30s whose family has had to move into her parents' house in Natick, and who has their two homes on the market.
We spoke of the time-honored and traditionally-admired Yankee virtue of not living within your means, but below your means. We spoke about the Yankee virtues of "making do," "going without," and giving to others. We spoke about ostentatiousness and conspicuous consumption. We pontificated about whether getting and spending represented an emotional or spiritual emptiness, or a hollowness in a part of American culture. We reflected on whether the childish "I want..." had replaced more durable and mature motives and life guidelines. We touched on what God wants from us, as we always do when we are together. We remembered the old-time Yankee pride in driving old, beat-up station wagons to the tattered old WASPy yacht club in Marblehead. We remembered the old-time Yankee pride in owing nothing, and the pride and freedom that confers: owning your life.
Then, after an excellent no-carb lunch and with a couple of chardonnays under our belts, we went shopping.
Photo: Simple but charming living quarters from Sipp's snarky piece on homes: I'm going to say somethng rude now.
"Ancient," to me, means before 1000 BC. After that, it's historic, more or less.
These are old pots. I stumbled on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's site with their collection of Athenian 6-4th Century BC red and black containers while searching for an illo for last Saturday's Saturday Verse. I am sure you have looked at their like before. These decorated containers were surely not for everyday use.
Here are a few of them:
Amphora, c. 530 BC
Amphora with chariot and soldiers, c. 540 BC
Bell-krater (wine mixing bowl) with three women, one playing lyre. c. 460 BC. I would assume that she is singing too.
Hydria (water jug), c. 500 BC
Ain't these intertubes cool?
Tuesday, April 21. 2009
There are things we can touch and perceive, or perceive with technology. Some things cannot be touched but can be easily perceived, such as the charming young lassies above. Or mental life: ideas, emotions, etc. And spiritual life.
For some reason, it's Greek Week at Maggie's and, while looking for something else, I found this bit somewhere at Wiki:
Socrates is contemptuous of people who think that something has to be graspable in the hands to be real. In the Theaetetus, he says such people are "eu a-mousoi", an expression that means literally, "happily without the muses" (Theaetetus 156a). In other words, such people live without the divine inspiration that gives him, and people like him, access to higher insights about reality.
 Socrates's idea that reality is unavailable to those who use their senses is what puts him at odds with the common man, and with common sense. Socrates says that he who sees with his eyes is blind, and this idea is most famously captured in his allegory of the cave, and more explicitly in his description of the divided line. The allegory of the cave (begins Republic 7.514a) is a paradoxical analogy wherein Socrates argues that the invisible world is the most intelligible ("noeton") and that the visible world ("(h)oraton") is the least knowable, and the most obscure.
It is certain that many are indifferent to the invisible world - practical, earth-bound types who are happily without the muses' gift - or burden - of reflecting on the "higher realities" and the hidden realities which seem to try to connect the human heart with the cosmic. The meta-physical or trancendent realm of thought and experience which many of us seek to grasp and hold. More:
The word metaphysics derives from the fact that Aristotle's musings about divine reality came after ("meta") his lecture notes on his treatise on nature ("physics"). The term is in fact applied to Aristotle's own teacher, and Plato's "metaphysics" is understood as Socrates' division of reality into the warring and irreconcilable domains of the material and the spiritual. The theory has been of incalculable influence in the history of Western philosophy and religion.
Indeed we are all Greeks - especially those of us who are Christians (the Greek Paul thoroughly Greekified the Christ Cult, thus translating it into a world religion). "Psyche," the soul, was a combination of the psych-ological (mental) and the spiritual/divine aspects of reality as we experience it, until academics in modern times separated psychology out as a topic of study in the Aristotelian slicing-and-dicing way. Being sober sorts, they did not want to call Psychologists "soul students," nor did Psychiatrists want to call themselves "soul physicians." So they put it in Greek, same as most of the other -ologists and -iatrists.
Photo on top of a few untouchable Muses borrowed from Egotastic.
Image below: Bust of Socrates, Louvre
Left and Right participants, from Trotsky to Hayek, in the 20th Century’s debates over the role of government have agreed that a major danger emerges from the coming to power of the “New Class” of intellectuals and public policy managers whose primacy over the hoi polloi (some even refer to the commoners as sardines) is ensured by self-profiting politicians, together extending government controls into more spheres of society. (A brief summary of New Class thought at Wikipedia.)
This New Class debate lay at the core of understanding the essential corruption of morality, of true popular governance, and of state powers that ensues from the rise of this privileged New Class.
My friend Lorie Byrd tries to explain to the in-denial and in-disparagement New Class the Tea Party protests across the country by about 600,000 ordinary citizens: “many average, everyday Americans were not thrilled with the ‘change’ they were getting from the new administration.” This is not an intellectual movement, couched in fancy words, but is the hoi polloi’s recognition of a basic intellectual truth, that the New Class is robbing their resources for their own expansion of power and profiteering.
The rude – indeed classless -- disdain and insult expressed by so much of the liberal commentariat toward the Tea Partiers exhibits their deeper fears of their spreading rejection as more and more Americans realize and react to their gross power grabs. Their fear, and arrogance, propels their haste to ram through major redefining programs before they are stopped by the 2010 elections reducing their Congressional majorities.
2010 can’t come soon enough. So, it is proposed that Tea Partiers crowd the townhall-type meetings held by their Congressmen and Senators to drive the point home before 2010.
The New Class may lack class, but they will recognize their overstepping will undermine their own survival. Behind their crude attitude toward Tea Partiers is their recognition their window of opportunity to further aggrandize themselves is short.
The legacy media is rapidly being replaced by alternatives which do not insult or ignore the legitimate grievances of the hoi polloi. The captains of industry in-bed-with taxpayer bailouts for their excess greed and irresponsibility are recognizing the self-destructive deal with the devil relegating them to managers of the corporate state. The unions, whose demise in private industry has been offset by controlling the government bureaucracies, are seeing their legislative goals to increase their sway sinking, while their bankruptcy of public services through excess benefits is arousing the poorly served public. The leaders of non-profits, who use their tax-exemptions to indulge in obtaining taxpayer grants that feed huge compensation packages, are startled that they are being viewed as abusing their privileges.
Onward, Tea Partiers.
Monday, April 20. 2009
Georgia born-and-raised, and CT resident Flannery O'Connor died of lupus at 39 in 1964.
A collection of her occasional pieces, Mystery and Manners, was assembled by her friend the translator and poet Robert Fitzgerald. In that collection is a gem of an essay, "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade."
Caitlin Flanagan in his WSJ piece The High Cost of Coddling (h/t, Viking) commented:
In my teaching days, no single document shaped my thinking as much  as Flannery O'Connor's 1963 essay called "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade." It concerned neither guns nor violence, neither cliques nor experimental approaches to the treatment of adolescent depression. It was about . . . books. In defending the teaching of the great works of the Western canon rather than those of the modern day (which kids far preferred), she said something wise, the sort of thing an adult might say. She said that the whims and preferences of children should always, always be sublimated to the sense and judgment of their elders.
"And what if the student finds this is not to his taste?" O'Connor asked. "Well that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed."
The full O'Connor quote (via Book of Joe) is:
In other ages the attention of children was held by Homer and Virgil, among others, but, by the reverse evolutionary process, that is no longer possible; our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. No one asks the student if algebra pleases him or if he finds it satisfactory that some French verbs are irregular, but if he prefers Hersey to Hawthorne, his taste must prevail.
No child needs to be assigned Hersey or Steinbeck until he is familiar with a certain amount of the best work of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, the early James, and Crane [we can quibble with the names; I certainly quibble with Cooper’s inclusion], and he does not need to be assigned these until he has been introduced to some of the better English novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The fact that these works do not present him with the realities of his own time is all to the good. He is surrounded by the realities of his own time, and he has no perspective whatever from which to view them. Like the college student who wrote in her paper on Lincoln that he went to the movies and got shot, many students go to college unaware that the world was not made yesterday; their studies began with the present and dipped backward occasionally when it seemed necessary or unavoidable.
The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.
And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.
Saturday, April 18. 2009
A nice Spring walk this morning on CT's "Gold Coast" waterfront:
Friday, April 17. 2009
I opted out of Medicare years ago. I felt morally torn about doing so, but finally my bookkeeper refused to do any more of their paperwork. That settled it.
My compromise was to institute a generous sliding fee scale for Medicare-aged folks. (My general policy is to never decline a referred patient because of money.) From a young Doc, in the WSJ:
Here's something that has gotten lost in the drive to institute universal health insurance: Health insurance doesn't automatically lead to health care. And with more and more doctors dropping out of one insurance plan or another, especially government plans, there is no guarantee that you will be able to see a physician no matter what coverage you have.
Consider that the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission reported in 2008 that 28% of Medicare beneficiaries looking for a primary care physician had trouble finding one, up from 24% the year before. The reasons are clear: A 2008 survey by the Texas Medical Association, for example, found that only 38% of primary-care doctors in Texas took new Medicare patients. The statistics are similar in New York state, where I practice medicine.
More and more of my fellow doctors are turning away Medicare patients because of the diminished reimbursements and the growing delay in payments.
Thursday, April 16. 2009
The Grateful Dead always performed on Persian carpets. Rug Rag takes a look at what The Dead, as they are now known, walk around on.
And speaking of rugs, here's a 5X6 Bakhtiari "flower bed" design I like. I now must brace myself for the rug expert readers to inform me of everything that is wrong with it...Our rug expert readers must understand that our rugs get rough treatment. They are subject to ice-melting salt, dogs, driveway gravel, work boots, mud, and the occasional spilled glass of red wine. Truly special antique rugs would a shame to use and abuse as we do. New-made rugs? Wouldn't touch 'em. Vulgar, garish-looking junk, most of it, with all the character of a Woolworth's velvet kitten picture.
Wednesday, April 15. 2009
 The note I wrote in my son’s 9th birthday card today says, “Character is everything,” and I listed the many traits of sound character he has of which I am proud. I’m even proud of his hijinks at school for which he gets in trouble. He immediately takes responsibility, his punishment, and does not lie, evade or implicate others.
After he left for school this morning, I turned to my coffee and local newspaper. The frontpage carried a New York Times article about how Disney is trying to discover what TV shows will appeal to boys, “a group that Disney used to own way back in the days of ‘Davy Crockett’ but that has wandered in the age of more girl-friendly Disney fare such as ‘Hannah Montana.’ “ Disney’s consultant focuses on Black Sabbath T-shirts and such as their key.
Instead, Disney should refocus on Davy Crockett. Disney, and other children’s programmers, used to present tales of heroism and character. Beaver Cleaver and his big brother were to be emulated and not the worse than Eddie Haskells that are the lead characters today on Disney and Nickolodean. Parents were guardians and guides, not dolts.
I looked back at when the change started in the late ‘60’s, the chronological root of many of today’s cultural ills. By the 1980’s, when I had risen high in corporate life, I saw the ramifications as the up-through-the-ranks World War II generation who were my mentors began to retire or be pushed aside by a new breed with big degrees but relatively little experience and even less earned character. They measured themselves and others by smooth talk, quick tricks and personal profit, over the hard truths, diligent effort and contribution to all’s success that their predecessors emphasized and demanded. The new scorecard was perverted.
The current economic fallout is a direct result of this replacement of character with selfish and reckless aggrandizement.
Excellence requires that we provide consistent value, not cut-throat abandon of values.
Investment produces lasting benefits to many, while speculation chases the fastest – and usually elusive -- buck.
Simple, straightforward information delivers meaning, while mumbo-jumbo complexity hides empty promises.
Reasonable, factual expectations leads toward tangible accomplishments, while “irrational exuberance” and greed lead toward being a willing target for schemers.
Looking to honestly satisfy others’ needs creates bonds of lasting trust, while exploiting others’ fears and ignorance creates temporary dupes.
Competing to be best and to earn trust creates standards of worthy behavior, while unearned honorifics and facile words and actions breaks down society’s bonds and future.
Making a positive difference in society and in others’ lives leaves a legacy, while hollow charisma leaves a vacuum.
You can’t have too much character. Character is life’s scorecard.
 Like you care, right? The purpose is really to highlight a novel, Brothers, by Da Chen.
I seem to read novels as 1/3 of what I read, but I will read whatever is put in front of me, and whatever serendipity provides me with. Nothing on TV engages me. I always bear in mind that somebody worked darn hard to write that book.
Da Chen is an American author, raised in China during the Cultural Revolution. Besides being a compelling story, the book offers lots of insight into how China really operates - especially inside the political aristocracy.
One thing you learn right away is that in most Socialist and Communist nations, power and money and chicks and perks and mansions with military guards and vacation homes and the best food and drink and fancy cars accrue to the pols and their kin instead of to the productive. They create their own ingrown, inbred aristocracy with the power of the money, the government, the bureaucracy and the military to support and maintain it. They re-create Feudalism with the Mandarins and the "masses." We, dear readers, are supposed to be "the grateful masses."
(At the time that he writes about, 80% of China's adults were government employees. Not any more, happily. Canada is now up to 20%, last I heard, and headed up. Government employees are easy to control - and very easy to tax.)
 We post frequently on the sickness infecting Western liberal arts education - the spineless relativism which causes them to doubt, or to hate, themselves, and to denigrate everything that is cheerful, loving, grateful, positive, appreciative of their heritage (and of their work itself, which is as "Western" as can possibly be - "Western" to a fault), Judeo-Christian, and freedom-oriented.
Harvard Chaplain supports death penalty for apostates. Ah, the Religion of Death. He's probably not afraid to say that he wants death for me too, as a Christian who will not submit to Islam. That comes next. Not to worry: our flaccid generation will commit cultural suicide when asked to do so.
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