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.
We're doing NY this weekend. The New York Botanical Garden's Monet Show will be closing soon. They recreated his garden in Giverny, inside the Conservatory, right down to his lily pond and his bridge - painted in his own bridge color.
His gardens were a blooming frenzy of uncoordinated color. Dominant? Roses, Helianthus, and Dahlias this time of year. He scoured the world for interesting plants, and threw them in. In his later years, he only painted his garden.
We love gardens and gardening ideas, getting ready for Spring right about now. I believe that Mrs. BD is finally in recovery from her historic, purist insistence on not mixing annuals with perennials.
Since lead shot was (rightly) outlawed for waterfowl hunting in North America in 1991, the varieties of alternatives have been growing.
Steel shot was the first to appear but steel has low density (hits softer, travels shorter, and thus requires larger shot size than lead). Many folks were reluctant to put magnum steel loads through older or valuable shotguns, it altered choke functioning, and many felt that steel produced too many crippled birds. (I thought so, but I am usually not a very good shot with waterfowl unless I am in the groove.)
Then came Bismuth, and Bismuth-Tungsten - all much more expensive than steel, but with densities closer to those of lead, and presumably gentler on the barrel than steel. Plus you use the same shot sizes as with lead, say, #4 for decoying ducks and BB for geese.
The non-toxic shot I've been hearing about lately i Hevi-Steel, an iron-tungsten shot which is as cheap as regular steel but with a density approaching that of lead. There's a good, detailed review of Hevi-steel here. Given the price, it sounds like an excellent choice for those giant flocks of Snow Geese.
I think Bismuth is my first choice for ducks, especially since I can do everything the same way I used to do with lead, but I wonder what our readers like to use for ducks and geese because I am no expert on this.
Springtime is the time to plant annuals, but fall is the best time to plant perennials, shrubs, and trees as I explained earlier.
Today, spring bulbs. You do not want to plant them until nights are regularly below 50 degrees F or the bulbs will either rot or try to send up shoots.
However, early enough to get some roots into the soil.
Many horse owners, and pretty much all owners of horses of any value, purchase insurance packages including medical and death benefit.
Many companies offer it. It's a free market. See Google equine insurance.
What was most interesting to me about the topic is that all of the medical insurance is Major Medical (which I believe to be the only sensible medical insurance to buy, but increasingly scarce) and it is quite inexpensive. Why inexpensive? Because it doesn't cover birth control, poison ivy, or the sniffles.
I suppose one reason it is inexpensive is because you shoot a horse with a broken leg, which is thus an inexpensive and relatively quick procedure. However, surgery for colic can cost over $10,000. and is not reliably successful.
The NHS is well-known for letting the elderly ill pass away without care (no bullets or lethal injections yet), and Obamacare will do the same, in time.
I wish I could buy some of that inexpensive equine insurance for myself (minus the bullets unless absolutely necessary). I don't mind going to a vet instead of an MD.
Furthermore, I'd prefer a bullet or a bolt to drawn-out pain, misery, and incapacitation.
We are all weary of the drearily repetitive claims of oppression and the academic insistence on PC orthodoxy. Everybody is oppressed - especially in America. And white-colored males are oppressed by the "victims."
What is true at Bowdoin is more or less true everywhere.The power of the victims' studies departments lies not in what they say but in their ability to prevent inquiry that runs against their preferred narratives.They need not go to a lot of trouble to make this happen.They are more often like rocks in the stream.The regular flow of academic life simply goes around them.Few faculty members or administrators want the hassle of getting in their way.
Bawer's book is as vivid an account of the history, the shifting rationalizations, and the rhetoric of victims' studies as we are ever likely to have.This owes something to his insider status.An openly gay man whose 1993 book, A Place at the Table, advanced the cause for integration of gays into mainstream society, Bawer is deeply sympathetic to academic work that emphasizes the history of groups who have struggled against prejudice. Moreover, he has been a participant in some of the key debates that shaped these fields.His chapter on how "gay studies" ("a serious academic discipline") was displaced by "queer studies" (a celebration of "oppositional relation to the norm") is the centerpiece of the book.He recounts his own disputes with queer theorists such as David Halperin, who attack him for criticizing the late Michel Foucault, whose view that sex is "socially constructed" is the founding principle of queer theory.
If sex is a social construct, somebody needs to inform the birds and the bees because they did not get the memo.
The Times Of Israel has published my piece, "A liberal rabbi's wake-up call for liberal Jews." The central theme of the rabbi's wake-up call is that "with great power comes great responsibility", focusing upon Iran and upon the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel diatribes and harrasment that frequently occurs on US college campuses. Liberal Jews in the US cannot afford to avoid or look away from directly and vigorously confronting these existential threats. Jews must use the historically recently-won power to defend ourselves. Otherwise, the almost two-millenia of fear and hiding, of slaughter, can return.
When Jefferson returned to America about five years after he had left, he brought back “eighty-six crates with kitchen utensils and equipment, including a pasta-making machine from Italy.” He also brought various wines and cheeses, olive oil and mustard, “seedlings of fruit trees” including apricots, pears and figs, and 680 bottles of wine.
He knew how to travel. The article does not mention whether he tried the pizza (he seemed to stay mostly in Tuscany and the Piedmont where there is no pizza), but he did introduce Washington DC to Macaroni and Cheese. That was a good move, but he also brought home Italian (arborio) rice. Can't make Risotto without it.
Pic is Fettuccine Alfredo, aka Mac 'n Cheese. A touch of black truffle shavings, preserve, or black truffle oil makes it even better. I've even seen it in fancy joints with caviar on top. Like all pastas, it's meant to be a small Primi, of course, not a Secondi.
I have seen American kids grow big and strong, smart and athletic on Cheerios, Peanut Butter and Jelly on Wonder Bread (or Fluffernutter), and Mac 'n Cheese for supper.
Fees for services vary depending on the area of the country one inhabits.
I've been collecting some from my area of Connecticut:
- Private practice legal services, paperwork: $300-450/hr, with volume discounts and pro-rated for time - Private legal services, court time: $500-600/hr - Home health aide: $20-25/hr - Home health, Registered Nurse: $40-70/hr - Nurse Anesthetist: $200/hr - Prep and insertion of dental implant (not including the crown): $1800. for about 30-40 mins. - Veterinary check-up (dog) plus shots and lots of labs: $1200. - Independent financial/estate advisor (non-legal): $200-500/hr - Auto mechanic: $30-60/hr - Babysitter: $15-20/hr (more if more kids) - Live-in nanny: $300-400/week - Registered Dietician: $125-150/hr - Brief office visit to Internist (10-15 mins, no tests): $125 - Internist, routine "annual" physical, not including labs/tests: $600. - Short visit to Dermatologist, with minor slicing and dicing: $250 - Shrink visits: $300-400/hr (pro-rated for time) - Harpist for parties: $150-175/hr - Piper (Bagpiper): $150-175/hr - Electronics repair: $175/hr (rarely worth it nowadays) - Home computer services: $200/hr - Master carpenter: approx $50/hr, less with bigger job - Painter: approx $25-40/hr, more with bigger job? - Master gunsmith (wood or steel work): $60-80/hr - Per diem bookkeeper: $35/hr - Chimney Sweep: $175/first chimney, $125 each additional - Yard work: $100/man-day
If you wish to share fees of various services in your area, please do so in the comments.
It includes some good, friendly discussion of social equality vs. economic equality, and of economic mobility which I see as one of the wonders of American society.
Here's one bit from Voegli, speaking to Noah:
I close by remarking on your wistfulness about the absence of internal radicals or external Communists who might prod us to equalize incomes. It is in keeping with your hopes, now certainly flagging, that Occupy Wall Street would catalyze a politically irresistible redistributive movement. In your book's final sentence-"The worst thing we could do to the Great Divergence is get used to it" - you are trying to say something to the Americans indifferent to that great crusade. But perhaps they, in their reluctance to enlist, are trying to say something to you about their abiding desire for economic vigor and absolute mobility, and their abiding fears about the power and decency of redistributive government.
The average US income, per person, in 2011 was about $45,000. Make that an income cap, with anything above taxed at 100%. As a start, I suggest that this example of equality begin with Washington politicians and federal employees. It might catch on.
Why stop with income? Let's address assets too, which are much more important for economic equality. The average American's net worth in 2011 was $77,000. Let's bring the pols and bureaucrats down to that too, and take the rest away from them for equality and the Common Good. Bernanke, too, and Obama, Harry Reid, John Kerry, The Clintons, Elizabeth Warren, etc. Maybe throw in Krugman, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates just for giggles, and confiscate all trusts.
I suggest that the same apply to the owners and staff of The New Republic and The NY Times. If it requires force, so be it.
For my plan to work, obviously the government will need to set the prices of everything because otherwise nobody could afford stuff. Hey - it might just work!
That's what Lucianne said re Romney's fund-raiser talk.
Seems non-controversial to me. When he said "I'm not going to worry about those people" he was referring to getting their votes, with the implication that they are already bought. (I think he is wrong about that, BTW.)
Moral of the story? Never say anything that, when taken out of context, sounds bad. Of course, that is impossible to do. And for the MSM, everything Conservatives say is a gaffe.
At Drudge, as of now, 1 in 16 Americans are taking Disability. If 1/16th of America is really disabled to work, we're in big trouble. And what % use EBT cards now?
Took this lousy pic of a majestic White Oak on Saturday, growing on the edge of the marsh, on Constitution Island.
White Oaks are happy to grow near wetlands, and their acorns feed all sorts of wildlife. They are said to live 600 years. I have seen some huge ones surviving in woods where there had been pasture 100 years ago.
Quirky, quaint, and comfortably shabby and unpretentious, Cold Spring (pop. 1900) is a 75-minute commute to Grand Central Station on the Metro North Hudson line. A few commute daily, but a good number commute for weekends because if your legs are good, you can walk from the train station to everywhere in Cold Spring.
It's nice to see the downtown of a small town so busy with friendly people, walking people, busy cafes, etc. Seems to be the sort of town in which it is impossible to be anonymous.
The village is about 40 minutes north of White Plains, and a half hour south of Poughkeepsie, Hyde Park, and the great CIA - The Culinary Institute of America with its great restaurants. It's the Juillard of cooking. This view down the Hudson from the lawn of Boscobel, site of the famed Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival (their photo, not mine):
This is Lower Main St., with the little gazebo on the Hudson shore. I tried to avoid taking pics of people.
Iceland was a mess after the 2008 meltdown. By 2012, while GDP per capita is still at depressed levels, unemployment is also down dramatically and growth has returned, making Iceland a 'star' among the embattled European nations.
It helps, somewhat, to be a homogeneous and isolated isle. It also helps to let financial institutions fail so debt can be washed out properly.
I'm not a fan of rap music, but Russ Roberts and Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek have done a good job making economics entertaining for the younger crowd. I sent their Hayek vs. Keynes series of videos to my son at college. There is an appropriate correlation to the events in Iceland and Hayek's views. There is no Keynesian stimulus taking place there.
"[W]hen the boom has collapsed, there exist dislocations and disproportionalities in the world of industry, the wreckage of false expectations, which monetary manipulation is not likely to remove."~Lionel Robbins in 1934, writing on the Great Depression
This is my idea of a pizza. Thin crust so it's almost like a cracker, cooked in a wood-fired oven. Shape doesn't matter, and if it's not a little scorched it doesn't taste right. Toppings? Whatever you can find in the fridge or the pantry. No tomato sauce, please. Never! I think this one is Buffalo mozzarella, asparagus, sliced yellow tomato, and pancetta. Nice.
People with outdoor wood-fired pizza ovens have pizza parties where you assemble your own small ones from a vast assortment of ingredients, then throw it in the oven for 3-5 minutes. I have a pal who does this. That's how they made fast food in ancient Rome.
Someday, I will build an outdoor combination oven and grill out of fieldstone. Indoor cooking is for the birds, and ovens were never meant to be indoors. My Memphis cast iron grill/smoker is excellent - burns wood just as well as charcoal - but it would not work for pizza, bread or calzones where you need a deep oven with a banked wood fire in the back.
Here's how to use a wood-fired oven:
And here's Baking bread in the Wood Oven. Watch that, and you'll understand the luxury of electric or gas ovens - 3 to 6 hours to heat up a wood oven.
Kayaked down the choppy and windy Hudson a piece from the charming, granola-feeling old river hamlet of Cold Spring, NY (which was packed with cheerful strolling, shopping, and eating people) then snuck under the Metro North Hudson Line bridge into Constitution Marsh just before the tide got too high to get under it.
They rent kayaks on the river. We rent kayaks. Kayaking on ordinary waters is easy for anybody. We did a good 4 hours. The rental guy said "Use your core, not your arms, and find your core rhythm." We are not proficient yet, but we sure enjoy it. The pros give the same advice for tennis, but I still use my arms. I have no core rhythm for anything.
Those hills are the Hudson Highlands, on the other (west) side of the river. Storm King. Dramatic. The Hudson there is still tidal, but low salinity. Can barely taste salt when you splash yourself.
Did not see a lot of migrants - no Teal yet. A migrant Harrier, Osprey, and some Spotted Sandpipers, a Sharpie, plus the resident Bald Eagles, Cormorants, Black Ducks, Mallards and herons (Great Blue and American).
A recurrent thought was that this must have been great for October and November duck hunting before the Audubon Society took it over. Good for Rail shooting too. The marsh is full of Wild Rice and Cattails. In the 1830s, some guy tried to make it a Wild Rice farm, hence the kayak routes and the abundance of Wild Rice.
No powerboats allowed. You could get lost in there if they did not have water-trail markers because it is a water maze. Good fun. We kayaked down to the southern lake, and visited the Audubon lodge there (and grabbed a coffee, chatted with the naturalist, and used their facilities).
If you kayak down the marsh around 40 minutes, you turn a corner and what do you see, across the marsh, across Constitution Island, and on the other side of the Hudson?
As I recall, George Washington picked that location. The big river is narrow and defensible there, due to Constitution Island poking into it.
In Psychiatry today there is much discussion, debate, and confusion about diagnosing the varieties of serious mood or attitudinal instability (ie instability which is life-disrupting in some significant way).
It's not your grandfather's Bipolar Disorder anymore. The numbers of people labelled as "Bipolar spectrum" has increased dramatically, for better or worse, in recent years. It may be "diagnosis creep," or it might be better understanding. A complicating factor is the overlap between Bipolar Spectrum problems and Borderline Personality, discussed here, where flips in attitudes towards relationships (eg idealization and devaluation) can be prominent in both (along with volatility, grandiosity, hypersensitivity, rage and paranoia).
All of this mess can be treated. I have become a fan of Lamictal for mood instability and attitude shifts which do not rise to the level of full-blown Manic-Depression but which are well-outside the normal moods and shifts of daily life. Lamictal plus confrontational psychotherapy, and maybe an antidepressant.
It hardly matters, and I suspect that nobody cares much including FLOTUS, but it is interesting if true. (h/t Moonbattery.) It is claimed that Obama and ballet dancer Rahm hung out at "Man's Country."
Male dancers are not always gay - see Baryshnikov. Lots of talented guys dance for the money and the chicks.
When I was about to graduate from high school as an amiable screw-off, ranked barely above the lower quarter of my class, my father, who had not gone to college, told me that if I wished to go he would pay my way, but he encouraged me to consider whether my going wouldn’t be a waste of time. He personally thought I might make a hell of a good salesman, which was a compliment, for he was himself a hell of a good salesman, and a successful one. I eschewed his advice, not because it wasn’t sound, but chiefly because I felt that, at 18, I wasn’t ready to go out in the world to work.
In those days, the University of Illinois was, at least for residents of the state, an open-enrollment school. If you lived in Illinois, the school had to take you, no matter how low in your high school class you graduated. Lots of kids flunked out, and my own greatest fear on the train headed from Chicago down to Champaign-Urbana, in white bucks and reading The Catcher in the Rye, was that I would be among them.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. For today, we'll (semi-ironically) adopt the Democratic Socialist Party's meme: We didn't build Maggie's Farm on our own.
We rely on the geniuses who made the intertunnels possible, the engineers who provide us with our coal- and nuclear-energy, on the geniuses who invented the hyperlink and YouTube, on our Webmeister who keeps this rickety site functioning with duct tape and baling wire, on hundreds of other bloggers, websites, and news sources for content, on our commenters who add zip, on Dunkin Donuts which keeps us going, on Panasonic who built my Lumix, etc etc - and on our readers and the good folks who link to us.
It's a communal effort, and an enjoyable one. Many farm hands make light(er) work. No government involvement or funds, however.
This is our biannual request that our readers pitch in and give us a hand by sending out the word about our eclectic, informative, and politically-Centrist/Libertarian website. As I always say, our readership is our reward for what we do here.
Pic of the Maggie's Farm hard-working back office farm hands - and fact-checkers (Zachriel missed the photo op) - safely below the fold.
If you think I was angry yesterday…then stand by for today. Let’s connect the dots in close to real time. Reasonably, President Bush took aggressive action against the Afghan and Iraqi regimes that sponsored terrorism against the US and its allies, although – along with every intelligence service – in major error believing that Iraq’s WMDs were more and more able. At the same time, reasonably, President Bush exerted himself to inform Americans to separate believers in Islam from radical Islamists.
That latter distinction is still valid. However, experience has demonstrated that the radical Islamists have grasped power in country after country while the voices or efforts of moderates have been inadequate or squelched by both the radical Islamists and by much of the Western media making increasingly tenuous excuses for the radicals.
Cap that off with an Obama administration, from the president himself to his appointed minions in the highest levels at the State Department, apologizing for supposed US sins, as claimed by radical Islamists, and otherwise stubbornly pursuing fairy tale wishes that catering to radicals will transform them into moderates and allies.
This same Obama administration failed to negotiate a reasonable timetable and process for reducing our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan while directing our military to leave more quickly. This has increased instability in those two countries in which Americans have sacrificed, persuaded fence-sitters to lean or go into the radical Isalamist camps, and encouraged bolder defiance from Maliki and Karzai of US and Western interests.
With all that and more background, the attacks yesterday on the US Embassy in Cairo and the US Consulate in Benghazi should come as little surprise. It should also come as little surprise that the response by the Obama administration was so initially apologetic -- and little better in its walk-back -- to the attackers instead of calling them out as thugs and demanding apologies from the Egyptian and Libyan governments for standing by. It should come as little surprise when there are more attacks on US Embassies and Consulates in the MidEast. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which has seized almost all power in Egypt, calls for more nationwide demonstrations this Friday. There are strong signs that Islamists in other Arab countries are stampeding in that path.
Apologists for extremism, abroad, in the White House or media, will continue to twist themselves into putrid pretzels of pusillanimity, and the media play along, with the most prominent prime perpetrator of press cover-up, the New York Times, even being so craven to keep yesterday’s outrages off its front page.
Presidential contender Mitt Romney, while pointedly criticizing the weak Obama response, needs to go much further, and quickly, to demonstrate how his administration would put spine back in the deboned eagle of the past four years. MidEast expert Michael Rubin lays out a program. That’s more and better than these offenses just being bantered and battered about without purposeful action.
It’s past time to return the proud and mighty eagle to prominence, talons bared, and let our enemies stand by for a thrashing wherever and whenever we decide. No longer can they be allowed so much initiative to incite without serious consequence, expecting the US to just whimper from the Oval Office.
Early fall (ie late Sept to November) is the best time for planting or transplanting most things in the temperate zone.
There's less heat to stress the plants, there's more rain, and plants have just enough time to send out new roots so they will be established by Springtime (and also because all plants begin growing - underground - well before what we consider Spring planting season. Thus fall planting gives them a double head-start to prepare. Plants grow roots at least a month before they show any green).
I planted three Knock-Out Roses this weekend. They are the easiest, most care-free, toughest shrub roses around. That's why they have become the biggest sellers. (Bill Radler built them - not the government - and he is getting rich from his creation. It's called genetic engineering.)
September to early October is the time to plant Peonies, too. I remember when everybody's grandma had a circular peony patch somewhere, but now people just put them in borders. Prepare their soil well, because Peony plants last a long time and take a year or two to become established and strong.
People recommend full sun for them, but half-day sun seems fine.
Hinderaker suggests that it might be the increase in the dependency culture. I wonder whether it's just because Obama's brand is cool, and Romney's is square. I doubt that the country has suddenly swerved Left.
BTW, I think Obama's DNC speech was entirely on purpose. That speech worked before, so why change anything? If it ain't busted, don't fix it.
I woke early on the morning of the operation and lay in bed thinking about the young mother I had operated on the previous week. I had operated on a tumour deep in the right side of her brain and somehow – I do not know how since the operation had seemed to proceed uneventfully – I had caused a major stroke, so that she awoke from the operation paralysed down the left side of her body. I had probably tried to take too much of the tumour out. I had probably strayed too deeply into her brain. I must have been too self-confident. I had been insufficiently fearful. I longed for this next operation, the operation on the pineal tumour, to go well – that there should be a happy ending, that everybody would live happily ever after, Neurosurgeons look with awe and excitement at brain scans showing pineal tumours, like mountaineers looking up at a great peak that they hope to climb. and that I could feel at peace with myself once again.
It's a wonder how many physicians are natural writers. Dr. Marsh is one.
Since lead shot was (rightly) outlawed for waterfowl hunting in North America in 1991, the varieties of alternatives have been growing. 
Springtime is the time to plant annuals, but fall is the best time to plant perennials, shrubs, and trees 
Many horse owners, and pretty much all owners of horses of any value, purchase insurance packages including medical and death benefit.
The guy travelled around France and Italy for years, eating and drinking everything new and tasty he could find. The Founding Foodie - 
Fees for services vary depending on the area of the country one inhabits.
I learned about 
Early fall (ie late Sept to November) is the best time for planting or transplanting most things in the temperate zone.