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.
First box arrived from Bluestone Perennials. Perfect timing to complete the installation of the new beds. Small plants now, but by June they will crowd out the weeds.
In case you're interested, here's what I am putting in them (much already done in the past 2 weeks):
Pink Knock-Out Roses Little Bunny Fountain Grass Dwarf Red Sedum Nepeta, tall blue and low white Creeping Phlox Boxwood Perennial Geranium Narcissus Scilla (Bluebell) Salvia Stella D'oro Daylily Giant Allium Asian Lily Aster Phlox Daisy Agastache Heliocanthus Red Salvia (Wild Thing) in defiance of Mrs. BD who believes that red is tacky in a garden.
Most of these good for Hummingbirds and butterflies. Many of them are transplants from places where they aren't thriving. If any annuals are needed, obviously I will add them in the Spring. Doubt I will need any, though. Well, for the first year I might need some.
Planning, preparing, and installing a new border is great fun but, like all gardening, it lacks immediate gratification unless you live south of the freezing line.
It takes 2 years for a perennial bed to begin to mature, 1 1/2 years if first planting is in the fall. If you plant in the fall, don't fertilize until Spring.
Heck, in my area, I just paid $4.239, and that's for regular.
How're prices in your neck of the woods?
Update: YIPES! I just refilled the gas tank for a camping trip tomorrow, a day after than the above post, and the regular gas price jumped to $4.689 !!!!!!! And, reports say that the California price is expected to jump again. Looks like prices are high everywhere, with California now even topping Hawaii. But, Hawaii is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with high transport costs. What's California's excuse? Ordinary maintenance of local refineries removes some capacity, which can't be filled in with gas from neighboring states due to California having its own different higher cost fuel composition standards. So, on top of California and some other states not allowing new refineries to be built, on top of gas prices driven up by mandating corn in it, and world food markets driven up by our diversion of corn into the gas tank, and the dollar being devalued by debt so it costs more to buy oil, California wants to be Hawaii! I know, many of you say, set California adrift. Thanks to envirocrazies, California is adrift, in high costs, high debt, shortages, middle class bailing out, companies leaving. -- Steven Hayward, another California resident, at Hot Air, hopes without real expectation that California voters will wisen up.
This map, found by Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, neatly sums it up:
It is a signal event when even some from the political left who has long sided with pro-Palestinian assertions wakes up and recognizes the horror that is Hamas.
In 2005, Israel unilaterally removed its military and residents from Gaza, leaving behind the infrastructure and commercial ventures Israel and Israelis had built. Muslim Brotherhood's spawn, Hamas, then took control over Gaza away from the Palestinian Authorities Fatah. Since, Gazans and Hamas have destroyed that inheritance and live off the charity of others, mostly Western. The thousands of rockets fired into Israel are excused by Western apologists.
But, the human rights abuses by Hamas against Gazans is finally being recognized by some in the anti-Israel camp.
In general, I thought of myself as someone who harbored few delusions about Hamas. Unlike an alarmingly large contingent of self-proclaimed leftists, I’ve never been willing or able to ignore the Islamic fascism that is the lifeblood of the group’s ideology, and that makes ridiculous any notion of it as a “resistance”. I confess, however, that I used to suspect there to be a degree of exaggeration and/or Zionist propaganda in the stories I would read about its moral policing.
Not so anymore. After meeting last weekend in Jordan with a group of Palestinian journalists that included three arrivals from Gaza, I was appalled to discover the reality is worse than I had dared imagine. Without me even mentioning the subject, they would almost tremble with rage as they described the party’s thuggery, palpably relieved at the opportunity to unload an intolerable weight off their chests.
…How “leftist”! How “revolutionary”!
The Middle East section of Human Rights Watch has long often carried the Palestinian meme as a major critic of Israel. Yet, Human Rights Watch’s latest report on Gaza is summed up in its release headline: “Gaza: Arbitrary Arrests, Torture, Unfair Trials.”
The 43-page report, “Abusive System: Criminal Justice in Gaza,” documents extensive violations by Hamas security services, including warrantless arrests, failure to inform families promptly of detainees’ whereabouts, and subjecting detainees to torture. It also documents violations of detainees’ rights by prosecutors and courts. Military courts frequently try civilians, in violation of international law. Prosecutors often deny detainees access to a lawyer, and courts have failed to uphold detainees’ due process rights in cases of warrantless arrest and abusive interrogations, Human Rights Watch found.
“After five years of Hamas rule in Gaza, its criminal justice system reeks of injustice, routinely violates detainees’ rights, and grants impunity to abusive security services,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Hamas should stop the kinds of abuses that Egyptians, Syrians, and others in the region have risked their lives to bring to an end.”
Human Rights Watch doesn’t let the Palestinian authorities in the West Bank get off lightly either:
Hamas’s rival in the West Bank, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, arrests and detains Palestinians arbitrarily, including Hamas members or sympathizers, and similarly subjects detainees to torture and abuse. The intra-Palestinian political rivalry remains a significant factor behind many Hamas abuses against detainees in Gaza, Human Rights Watch found.
Western funding, and Western apologists, keeps these two parasites on humanity existing, with little incentive to either decently treat those under their rule, stop siphoning away aid funds into leaders' foreign bank accounts, end hate propaganda among their residents, and cease attacks upon Israelis.
I have eaten Rocky Mountain Elk steaks. Tastes like Elk, ie, similar to Moose. I have friends who hunt them. Bow, not rifle. Good stories, good adventures.
The author points out that we all know that "correlation does not indicate causation", but there is an equally important error often drawn from data: The confusion of statistical significance with real world meaning.
As science grows more powerful and government more technocratic, the stakes of correlation—of counterfeit relationships and bogus findings—grow ever larger. The false positive is now more onerous than it's ever been. And all we have to fight it is a catchphrase.
In case you are refurbishing any temperate-zone perennial borders this fall, here are some of my pics of some informal borders at the NYBG. Even informal borders need structure: a wall, a hedge, a path - some architecture.
Every plant here has a label, so I remember what a number of them are if you ask in the comments:
"The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact."
With Dylan's Not Dark Yet. She's too young and pretty to sing this song, but she pulls it off. She borrows Dylan's incredible phrasing. Buddy found this, so you know it's worth it. Trust us:
Here's another lovely offering from Severa with Vlado Kreslin (no idea what they are saying):
I like home-grown tomatoes because they taste good. My gardens have always been "organic" only because I have never had a problem with insect pests - I grow enough so that the bugs and animals can have some - and because I enrich the garden soil with manure and peat moss (which are delivered to my garden center by polluting 16-wheelers). Nothing whatsoever to do with nutrition or good old Gaia, though.
America has been subject to food faddism forever. "Organic" produce is just the latest marketing scam for the wealthy and the body-obsessed. Here's a good update on the topic: Organic Illusions
As we've said here ad nauseum, there are three separate subjects here. First, the politically- and financially-powerful Education Industry. Second, the transfer of culture and knowledge. Third, the interest in learning and the capacity of kids to learn (plus, obviously, the value the family places on curiosity and knowledge).
Judging from what I see and hear daily, we have long reached the point of diminishing returns on the public school front.
The article is at Ricochet. The comments are good.
For young docs these days, it's about paying off $200,000 in loans (not to mention 3-4 years after that as an intern and resident on a pittance), the incredible burdens of paperwork and new regulations, conflicts between wanting to be independent and the security temptations of getting a salary.
The big change in the past 20 years is women becoming 50% of medical school students. When I went to med school, it was around 25%. Many of the women, I have observed, are happy working limited hours, do not mind being salaried, and do not welcome the burdens and risks of private practice, taking full personal responsibility for patients, being on call, etc. They want to have babies, with work as a sideline. It's a big change from the independent cowboy medical practice of the past. Those cowboys were my role models.
Without wanting to sound sexist, I do have to observe that women are more comfortable following the rules than men are.
A history of bankruptcy puts a nice ding on a person's credit rating and future employability. Even so, sometimes it's the only way to get a second chance in life if one has been highly irresponsibe and, hopefully, learned from it. Zero Hedge had this last Spring: Student Loan Debt Slaves In Perpetuity - A True Story Of "Bankruptcy Hell".
Naturally, cancelling out loans via bankruptcy will make lenders more cautious about lending to any student. But who is the biggest lender? Us, the government. Who is the biggest beneficiary? College administrations. Do you hear gripes about college administrator salaries? Nope, but college presidents make about the same as greedy CEOs.
Among other sun perennials I plan to squeeze into my new borders are a Shasta Daisy variety, one that grows 2' max instead of the tall ones.
Nowadays, they come in varying heights. Who built the original Shasta Daisy? The great Luther Burbank, of course. The guy was a master and pioneer of genetic engineering for commercial purposes. His russet potato is still the biggest seller, especially for French Fries.
BTW, you can google Bluestone Perennials for a wide selection of well-priced, fall-shipping plants. They are small, but if you put them in now they will grow robustly in the Spring and triple their size in a few weeks.
So much of political debates for the past 150 years have been about whether central control by supposed experts is preferable to private efforts to be good caretakers of their resources.
Regular readers know that we tend to have a deep distrust of government, central planning, and centralized power and believe that we are line with the Founders in that regard.
We have regularly posted about The Tragedy of the Commons here. The moral of the tragedy of the commons extends far beyond cow pastures, vast herds of bison, and marine resources. (In fact, it extends to government itself which tends to view the populace as an inexhaustable resource for its own purposes.)
We are re-building some perennial and shrub beds this fall. No garden is ever finished; most are usually in transformation. Having lost a large old Sugar Maple a few years ago, a shade border has become a full-sun border.
That's an opportunity, but it takes a lot of wheelbarrow and shovel work to prepare the beds (adding manure, peat moss, etc) and to get it planted before a frost - and I have a busy life. Designing a border is the fun part, and Mrs. BD has kindly told me that "It's your turn" to do it. Right now is the time to get the perennials in the ground, and shrubs and perennials planted or transplanted. Real gardeners try to plant in the fall, not in the Spring.
Most perennials can be bought online now for immediate delivery, while the local garden shop may have nothing but mums, asters, and pumpkins.
Part of the fun of design is ensuring early Spring through fall blooms, contrasting textures and heights, harmonious colors in the various bloom seasons, some degree of repetition, some plants which provide structure to the plan, something for winter interest, etc. It's a challenge, even if you are aiming for an informal "cottage garden." It's like painting.
Perhaps later I will list the plants I am putting in, but today just one of them: the late summer and fall-blooming Anemones (my pic from a NYBG border last week).
Readers know that I have long rejected the notion of a college-level Liberal Arts-focused education as an economic investment. However, I have praised it as a potentially life-enhancing guided exploration more deeply into our culture and into current knowledge than secondary school can do (although good private schools can do it). "Cultivation of the mind" and all that.
In other words, do I do not think of it as utilitarian. (Colleges were designed for scholars and clery - for the cognitive and/ or financially elite.) I learned much in high school and in college which have never provided me with a penny of profit but which I believe have enhanced my life in countless ways: Geology, Statistics, Intro Music History, Ancient Greek History, Russian Lit, etc.
However, when I went to college the ways of learning these things outside college were not as accessible as they are today. The self-informed scholars of the past had to spend hours in libraries, after work, just to try to figure out where to start. Today, you can get the best Music History course in the world from the Teaching Company for $200. and enjoy it at leisure - with no exams.
So we return to my recurrent question: Is Liberal Arts college about job-preparation, for networking, is it a meaningless credential, is it a way to delay adulthood, or is it a guided exploration into our culture and knowledge for the deeply curious and scholarly with high IQ?
In Obama's economy, the reality hits. Plumbers making $70-150/hr make much more money than most recent college grads and lead more independent and entrepreneurial careers. In fact, more than many recently-graduated professionals.
The great Renaissance theologian, zealot, and political reformer, was tortured, hanged, and burned in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence in 1498. The spot where that happened is well-marked in the Piazza.
Botticelli was just one of his famous followers, and supposedly burned some of his own paintings in the Bonfires of the Vanities.
Is this all simply about fear of Muslims, or do they really believe what they're saying? Regardless, their speech is offensive and should be banned. So should offensive Jihadist speech and the speech of all crazed Left-wing moonbats.
Those are old twin stables, the Scott's and the Beinecke's, in the East Village. Hard to imagine how many stables there were in NYC in 1870. Many converted to modern purposes. The paired red buildings.
I've been inside functioning NYC stables. Usually 3 stories: 1st floor for office, carriages and saddles, horse ramp to second floor with stalls, 3rd floor as a hayloft. Hole in floor of second storey to dumpster below. Perfect firetraps.
Caught a grim play about the Armenian genocide at the Atlantic Theater Co, then grabbed a very early supper at Gemma (335 Bowery St) - acceptable Italian food, great atmosphere, busy bar scene, full of happy, attractive young folks.
In fact, the East Village, the Lower East Side and Alphabet City have undergone an astonishing change in the past 10 years. It's been gentrified by throngs of youth, and they all look good. No dirty hippies or addicts there anymore, or, it seems, many people over 40.
Killing some time before preparing my last meal........that is, the last meal before fasting for Yom Kippur until tomorrow night, I looked for videos about fasting at Youtube. I came across this parody video about the semi-fast imposed on our school children by Michelle Obama. Her "brainchild" is the national school lunch policy, limiting calories and pushing foods that children often don't care for.
Children protest that they are being starved. OK, a bit of exaggeration from the younguns, but not too far off the mark for growing kids and teens' needs. Here's their video:
The creation of a massive diversity bureaucracy to police the faculty for bias against women and URMs can be justified only if there is evidence that the faculty need such policing. No one has yet presented a single example of UC San Diego’s faculty discriminating against a highly ranked female or URM candidate because of skin color or gender. The opposite is of course the case: female and URM Ph.D.s enjoy enormous advantages in the hiring market at UCSD and everywhere else. A professor in the Geosciences Research Division of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, whose wife is a UCSD “faculty equity advisor,” sent me a self-righteous rebuke for my initial criticism of the new VC for EDI. I asked him if he knew of any instance where a UCSD hiring committee had merely overlooked a top-notch female or URM candidate because the department was not trying hard enough to “diversify.” He responded that the supply of qualified “diversity” candidates was “so low that the policing of faculty . . . is virtually irrelevant.”
Hall Monitors, at $250,000/yr. It reminds me of how every Russian vessel used to have a Political Officer on board.
With deer fence. Nice garden. Mine is a complete mess right now, needs to be rebuilt. Dad has rows of raised beds, around 10 of them, inside the split-rail fence. One bed is asparagus, one is for my Mom's cut flowers. Peonies, Dahlias, Zinnias, etc.
As the trees have grown and begun to shade, the old folks want me to to come up with my chain saw and do some work. Dad's too old to be safe with a chainsaw, to put it mildly (Korean War vet, Second Lieut., US Army). Well, that's one more source of free firewood, but he needs some too. They have a wood stove in the kitchen. Yankees are cheap and proudly so, but we like to keep things looking orderly and respectable. Never know when the Pastor will stop by.
Maybe I will enlist my men's Bible study group for the job. Maybe my brother and my lad too. We like to do that sort of work, and all of them are young, strong, and enjoy chainsaws and wood-splitting. And we all enjoy doing hard work as a team. Lots of laughs, with beer. "Praise the Lord - the tree didn't fall on the truck." Wait until the ground freezes and I can get a truck back there.
That is happy Autumn Clematis growing on their garden gate.
Late September and early October is the time to re-seed and fertilize your lawns in the temperate zone. At this point, we have weeds, crab grass, holes from skunks and possums digging for grubs, chipmunk holes, wild strawberry infestations, and all sorts of other lawn miseries. (I do not have lawn irrigation - too much lawn to cover.)
Even though, in theory, we encourage minimizing lawn space (except for a good square for Croquet) and pleasant grass walking paths between gardens and borders, we do believe in pleasing, healthy lawn grass as a part of garden design.
The neurosciences were the sexy new frontier in the 1990s, but popular writers often offered the impression that any basic science of the central nervous system might have clear implications for understanding the workings of the mind.
The idea that a neurological explanation could exhaust the meaning of experience was already being mocked as “medical materialism” by the psychologist William James a century ago. And today’s ubiquitous rhetorical confidence about how the brain works papers over a still-enormous scientific uncertainty. Paul Fletcher, professor of health neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, says that he gets “exasperated” by much popular coverage of neuroimaging research, which assumes that “activity in a brain region is the answer to some profound question about psychological processes. This is very hard to justify given how little we currently know about what different regions of the brain actually do.” Too often, he tells me in an email correspondence, a popular writer will “opt for some sort of neuro-flapdoodle in which a highly simplistic and questionable point is accompanied by a suitably grand-sounding neural term and thus acquires a weightiness that it really doesn’t deserve. In my view, this is no different to some mountebank selling quacksalve by talking about the physics of water molecules’ memories, or a beautician talking about action liposomes.”
A superior and useful breed. Tollers prance around in a way which seems to attract ("toll") ducks - at least the stupid ones. (As in "Ask not for whom the bell tolls,...")
Why? It's a mystery. Who can read a duck's mind? Except another duck. Why do we think we have to cover Labs with camo and make them lay still? Because we are stupider than ducks? The Tollers get all of the fun. Multi-purpose animals.
And if you shoot the duck, they are very fine retrievers.
Nice bouncy red dogs which look like mutts. Which is a compliment, on Maggie's Farm. Mutts Is Us. Love 'em. But Tollers are AKC.
George Orwell, via 
Among other sun perennials I plan to squeeze into my new borders are a Shasta Daisy variety, one that grows 2' max instead of the tall ones. 
So much of political debates for the past 150 years have been about whether central control by supposed experts is preferable to private efforts to be good caretakers of their resources. 
Readers know that I have long rejected the notion of a college-level Liberal Arts-focused education as an economic investment. However, I have praised it as a potentially life-enhancing guided exploration more deeply into our culture and into current knowledge than secondary school can do (although good private schools can do it). "Cultivation of the mind" and all that.
The great Renaissance theologian, zealot, and political reformer, was tortured, hanged, and burned in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence in 1498. The spot where that happened is well-marked in the Piazza.
Late September and early October is the time to re-seed and fertilize your lawns in the temperate zone. At this point, we have weeds, crab grass, holes from skunks and possums digging for grubs, chipmunk holes, wild strawberry infestations, and all sorts of other lawn miseries. (I do not have lawn irrigation - too much lawn to cover.)