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.
Our readers know about Rawley's old hot dog joint in Fairfield from Gwynnie, but this is as good - better for seafood fans: Westfair Fish and Chips in Westport. It's right off I-95 for you hungry east-coast travellers.
Modest little clam shack has a fine raw bar too. Worth a trip, or makes a longer trip enjoyable. I will drive a good ways for fresh oysters, fried clam bellies, and fresh fried Cod.
Another Maggie's favorite just off I-95 is Gene's Famous Seafood (also a simple clam shack) in Fair Haven, MA. Sippican likes it too.
I just came up this this at my desk. "New services" means new medical services people will use now that they have insurance - along the lines of preventative care etc, which in my option may decrease "S" in the long term but not enough for an overall economic benefit. This model assumes the cost of insurance will be the same for everyone. My colleagues think it is a pretty robust equation.
Seems to me she gets to the heart of it. No, insurance companies cannot afford it without raising rates to a level which is impossible for the middle class and unacceptible to the federal regulators. Like requiring people to buy hybrid Rolls Royces that they don't want and cannot use. Then the companies will be blamed for the prices and few will remember that the government required the whole mess (just like the housing bubble).
Cahoon Hollow is a beach in Wellfleet, on good old unfancy lower (ie, upper, or outer) Cape Cod. It's their only ocean beach with a bar/restaurant - The Beachcomber - in an old life-saving station. They have bands. I believe Sippican played there in his dissipated youth.
The area is undeveloped thanks to JFK's Cape Cod National Seashore. Sometimes government does good things - but usually not. If you like warm water, the Cape Cod beaches are not for you. And unlike California beaches, at Cape Cod beaches people sit under beach umbrellas, sometimes have to wear wind-breakers in August, and tend to bury their heads in books while the cheerful sand fleas nip at their ankles.
These beaches attract some surfers, but the main water activity is body surfing: exhilarating fun, endlessly challenging, and the turbulence will pull down a gal's bikini top in an instant. Modest gals who like to body surf do not wear bikinis.
Lots of seals to swim with out there in August. The occasional Great White Shark, too. No fraidy cats allowed.
We probably don't eat as many hamburgers as we should, here at the Farm, but I am planning a friends and neighbors cookout for around 30 people and thought I would do some research on the best burger recipes.
Seems like a couple of splashes of Worcestershire sauce per pound, salt and pepper, and some Cuisenarted red onions is the simplest way to prep the meat. My preference for grilling is fatty beef, not lean. From Costco, of course.
My reading informs me that some people stir eggs, herbs, and all sorts of other things into the meat, but that sounds more like meatballs than burgers to me. Plus I like a burger rare, and who wants to eat raw eggs?
What crimes have you been subject to in your lifetime? - Not including ordinary rip-offs, school-age or barroom fist-fights, or unpaid invoices.
I'll start it off. I had a car stolen in Hartford about 15 years ago, and we had five saddles stolen from the barn about 6 years ago while vacationing. That's all I can recall. Never anything with violence or threat of violence, thank God. Well, I did run from two would-be young muggers in Cambridge many years ago when I was fleet of foot. Got into my car on a dark street before they caught up with me. I have a CT carry permit now, but I never carry out of state. That's jail time.
I lay on the grass, counting tweety-birds, after falling off the top step of a 12-foot ladder while trimming a tree in the front yard, my 12-year old son’s concerned face looking down at me. My father, who could and did do anything he set his mind to, until the day he died in his eighties, also stared down at me. At 64, I had something important to live up to and pass on to my son, so I forced myself to get up, smile, and say, “let’s get back to work” (ibuprofen to secretly follow later).
“NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP reads a plaque behind Dole.” So ends a respectful interview, “Great American”, with 88-year old former Senator Bob Dole by an otherwise snarky toward Republicans young lady from GQ. The young lady can't let go of the diminished physical condition of the man before her, but can't hide the respect and awe at his life. From athelete to crippled veteran to candidate for President to helping today's war wounded, Bob Dole gave all of himself, which stands tall before her.
As it so happens, this morning brought home that message from several other accomplished old men interviewed by my local newspaper, stirring me to talk about other old men and women with whom I spoke or chat with now on the phone. Their politics vary but they all came from impoverished roots here or abroad, are self-made, involved themselves fully in our national life. From my youth to now they share their anecdotes with their younger friend, from my callow days to me now at 64, as I sat or now sit figuratively enthralled at their feet listening. In their twilight years, still, they never never never give up, regardless the challenge, price or risk.
It’s their sense of duty to things greater than themselves, their love of country, which has animated them from youth to old age, a sense of humility before the obligation to pass on a better, stronger, decent world in which the only limitations are those placed on self. From famous labor leaders and former communists or socialists to industrialists to globe-trotting journalists and diplomats to national political figures to best-selling artists, authors and academics, all of theireyes sparkle and inspire as their self-effacing words did and do inspire me.
I met Bob Dole in the early 1970s, at the height of his political power, as he took the time to encourage me. I met the others either at the height of their successes or after. They took time to talk with me, answer my ignorant questions with enlightenment, and kick me in the ass when I dithered or wandered. I could list their names and the lessons they shared with me, but that would fill another several thousand words to even be very brief.
After years of hectoring him to write down some of his encounters with the famous and formative people who he met as an international journalist from the last days of WWII to now, a friend and mentor is now doing so. I hope to help him get it published. He laughed at me for constantly needling him to set his anecdotes down, saying no one cares anymore. I find myself saying similar to younger friends who similarly needle me to write it down. Maybe I will...if I make it to my eighties. You probably had or have similar people in your life. They need to be reminded that someone cares and many more will care if you help their lessons to be remembered by passing it on.
I took Chemistry from a Nobel winner chemist in a classroom of 250 eager students, many of them hopeful pre-meds. He clearly had been assigned to one undergrad class, but he didn't seem to resent it.
He had fun talking to a class of undergrads, but he talked about whatever he wanted to, whatever was on his mind. He liked to talk about how the planet was running out of oil so there would be no substrate left for medicines and organic chemicals. He said everything you need to know is in the textbook and, if you are confused, try to grab a TA.
Well, the impatient TAs had zero interest in that chore. As a result, many of us formed study groups which were great fun. I wanted to learn Chem so as not to be an ignorant person, and later took Organic for the same reason, despite being a History major. The Chem exams were a bitch. The five in my study group all got As, back before grade inflation. Science grades were curved. The reason our group did so well was partly because one of our study approaches was to create difficult problems for eachother. We'd meet at night in an empty classroom and do everything on the blackboard (remember them?).
Maggie's Farm readers are frequent guests of Bird Dog on his visits to the arts in Manhattan. I was shocked, really, actually shocked, when Bird Dog told me he'd never been to Brooklyn. By itself, Brooklyn is the 4th largest city in the United States. About 10% of Americans' families trace their families to originally being Brooklynites. Many of America's most famous celebrities hailed from Brooklyn, ranging from the early Dutch settlers who also bought Manhattan for trinkets and Thomas Paine, John Greeleaf Whittier and Walt Whitman, Mae West and W.C. Fields, George Gershwin and Aaron Copeland, John Steinbeck and Joseph Heller, Woody Allen and Barbara Streisand (my sister was at Erasmus Hall High School with her, Erasmus having the highest number of Westinghouse and National Merit Scholars in the nation), Lena Horne and W.E.B. DuBois, Gil Hodges and Sandy Koufax, to .........the list goes on and on. It contains top flight colleges. Prospect Park rivals Central Park. Its restaurants and arts are world class. There are far more beautiful brownstones than anywhere else. And, then, to top it off, its beaches have been New York's summer playgrounds and winter strolls for generations. One of those beach communities, next to Coney Island, is Brighton Beach. My grandmother and, later, my mother, in their old age lived in Brighton Beach highrises looking over the Atlantic and if you craned your neck you could see the Statue of Liberty. Here's a terrific photo homage to the Brooklyn that I grew up in. The video below is about Brighton Beach today, a thriving enclave for Russian emigres. They settled there because most were Jewish and the area was Jewish.
Bird Dog, doggit, you've got to get thee to Brooklyn, often. Manhattan midtown is where people not from New York City hang out, missing the real New York City.
My post at The New Criterionis up, “Judaic Studies and Western Civilization”. Judaic Studies in one form or another for centuries was a core subject in college curriculum, in order to best understand the West's Judeo-Christian civilization. Now, Judaic Studies has faded from centrality, as has much of the focus on Western civilization. That focus in Judaic Studies is what is needed to reinvigorate student interest and to keep Judaic Studies from degenerating into the sort of PCism and irrelevancy of other studies departments.
While visiting The New Criterion and enjoying its always interesting literacy, I encourage you to click its Donation page.
For those who refuse to click over to read my piece at The New Criterion, it is also below the fold.
For every person who says “I’m unhappy” there must now be a thousand who say “I’m depressed.” The change in semantics is important: the person who says he is unhappy knows that there is something wrong with his life that he should try to alter if he can; whereas the person who says “I’m depressed” is ill, and it is therefore the responsibility of someone else — the doctor — to make him better.
For the sorts of Psychiatrists who find it valuable to probe below the surface, there are many sorts of depression and many causes. Even grief can sometimes lead to a debilitating depression.
In my private office, the most common "cause" of agonizing, if not always debilitating, depression is narcissistic injury. These patients often can benefit enormously by psychotherapy alone, and can end up far healthier and stronger than before.
The simple truth why there are so many national security leaks is that the prime actors -- government officials, Congress, the media -- want them or are unwilling to stop them.
The current spate of serious leaks is not the first time this has occurred. There were major leaks during the Bush administration damaging to the post-9/11 ramping up of anti-terror activities, with no punishment of the offenders. By comparison, the leak of Valerie Plame’s not-so-secret CIA employment became the subject of a Special Prosecutor, and abuse of that process. These two examples revealed that prosecution and follow-up on leaks depended on whose political position was furthered and whose political ox was gored rather than the actual damage to national security.
There are laws on the books, federal agencies with the responsibility, and contracts signed that can be used to find and bring leakers to justice. Justifiably, national security professionals and front-line Special Operations forces have protested the lack of enforcement. Self-servingly, media has demanded even more impunity via a federal shield law. Partisanly, Congress has abdicated its oversight role. Avoidingly, Presidents have mouthed platitudes or claimed innocence.
The abdication of responsibility by those responsible or who should be deeply concerned about national security during the Bush administration has been taken to blatant new depths by the Obama administration’s re-election campaign.
The obvious truth is that these and other leaks are rarely the result of independent investigative reporting. Rather, someone in power secretly goes to the media with the damaging details, either to obstruct policy or to garner support for their own political ends.
Former US Attorney General Michael Mukasey writes...
This is from back when F&F was ordered by Obama in 2009 (thanks, reader):
Thus, a lousy and aggressive, if reckless, border plan, OK'ed by Obama and Holder, that resulted tragically. A fatal SNAFU, resulting in American deaths and many Mexican deaths. Why not just say so? Admit a well-intentioned but ultimately tragic error. That is termed "manning-up." There is nothing much to conceal here that I can see.
Unless there are tons of unfortunate emails about the PR approach to the mess that would be embarassing to the Administration. Stupid, unnessary cover-up? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Or am I missing something?
This is stupid stuff. The Admin's covert leaks to the media are the bigger scandal. This is a sideshow, despite these terrible and unnecessary deaths. Nobody died in Watergate.
In the case of universities, the anti-elitism strategy has been to insist that the degree experience become a near-universal benefit. At the same time, the belief has to be maintained that the whole thing is still in some way a major achievement, a reason for enhanced self-esteem. (This, of course, generates the familiar prizes-for-all inconsistency.)
The nagging doubt remains: as long as it is not literally for everyone, and as long as there are some institutions which are more exclusive than others, there is something about universities which is at odds with the prevailing ethos of perfect, Facebookish horizontality.
It is this ambiguity which seems to keep the what-are-universities-for programme busy, and makes boggling about the question so appealing. Nothing is said which contravenes the basic pseudo-egalitarian ideology, but a certain frisson is generated by juxtaposing mutually inconsistent requirements...
What is a "college education" in America, these days? Seems to me that there is no such unitary thing, and that it can mean almost anything. As I have mentioned here in the past, I have interviewed college grads who could not do calculus or even explain basic statistics, read a foreign language, or write a grammatical, well-structured formal essay. These basic skills can be achieved in high school, by those who want to learn stuff.
Or easily achieved in the library or on the internet. Not everybody is driven to learn things.
There's a debate going on these days about the notion of "college for all," and Robert Samuelson has been scoring points.
College for All, of course, entails extensive remediation for kids who are not prepared for, or capable of, "higher ed" as we older folks think of it. It also entails lowering expectations and standards. I don't blame the schools - I mostly blame the students. There is no such thing as "getting an education," because all learning is ultimately self-education. Without drive, curiosity, discipline, determination, and IQ nothing valuable will happen.
The education industry, naturally, markets itself and wants to fill all of their seats with warm, paying bodies even if they are not capable of serious high-school level achievement. Here's a summary of the current debate on college-level remediation.
Like a cross between a kayak and a surfboard. Probably invented by cavemen on logs, but new again.
They look like good clean fun. A friend of mine takes her dog on it with her. Her husband fly-fishes for Stripers and Blues off one in Block Island Sound, and looks down on decadent fishermen on comfy boats. I can picture a thrilling Nantucket Sleigh Ride with a fat Striper on the line. Cool ride.
There is always space for new sorts of water fun. I was told that a local joint sold out of them on Father's Day, at $700-2000 per board.
Apparently you can surf on them, if you have some sense of fun, but getting wet is part of it all. Generally, you have to keep your knees bent to do the balancing thing when there's a good chop or wavy gravy, as in skiing or snowboarding. Paddleboards.
It's difficult to study something that nobody can define in a non-circular way. From McCloskey: Happyism - The creepy new economics of pleasure. She makes the point that much of this is pseudo-scientific.
A quote from her very interesting essay:
...in the eighteenth century, our earthly happiness became important to us, in high intellectual fashion. By 1776, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was an unoriginal formulation of what we all, of course, now admitted that we chiefly wanted. John Locke had taught, in 1677, that “the business of men [is] to be happy in this world by the enjoyment of the things of nature subservient to life, health, ease, and pleasure”—though he added piously, “and by the comfortable [that is, comforting] hopes of another life when this is ended.” By 1738, the Comte de Mirabeau wrote to a friend, recommending simply, “[W]hat should be our only goal: happiness.”
“Our only goal.” To see how strange such a remark is, consider whether it could have been uttered by a leader of opinion in 1538. Martin Luther? Michelangelo? Charles V? No. They sought heavenly, artistic, or political glory—not something so domestic as happiness. Yet, in the late seventeenth century, even Anglican priests commenced preaching that God wanted us to be happy as much as holy. They called it “eudaemonism.” Anglicans and, astonishingly, some New England Congregationalists turned against the old, harsh, Augustinian-Calvinist line. We are not, declared the eudaemonists, mere sinners in the hands of an angry God, worms unworthy of grace. We are God’s beloved creatures, his pets.
The eudaemonistic turn was a Very Good Thing, resulting in fresh projects to better our stay here on Earth, some of them remarkably successful. Democracy was one, since, if you followed the fashion for universal happiness, it became impossible to go on insisting that what really mattered was the pleasure of the Duke or the Lord Bishop. Enlightened despots of the era claimed to seek the good of all, which paradoxically gave the populace the idea that maybe they themselves could do it.
I will remind our readers that Freud (yes, still relevant in many ways but not in all ways) had a somewhat tragic view of life and figured that pleasure and joy certainly matter, but that, overall, ordinary - "non-neurotic" - unhappiness is man's fate. Some days, I agree with that, other days, I don't.
By coincidence, Schneiderman's Unhappy or Depressed? I will need to return to the Dalrymple piece he quotes, later.
Do not go there. You will not like it. Nobody cool goes there.
The water is too cold for you as are the cones at Harbor Freeze or whatever it's called now; the people are mostly Liberals; everybody drives a Subaru with Obama stickers; the lobsters will snap at you; the air is way too pine-scented and salty; it's not fancy enough; you don't have to select your clothing; nobody has a hot tub; there are no swimming pools; it's cool and rainy sometimes and you need a sweater at night and you will get sunburned on the nice days; all the good food is just shellfish and fish; the beaches are too big and the ponds are too deep and dark; there are too many little kids in the restaurants; socialites, investment bankers, and politicians never go there; the blueberry-corn meal pancakes are terrible and the Portuguese seafood stews are terrible; the joint at Cahoon's Hollow is like totally bourgeois and their drinks are too big; there is too much surf on the ocean beaches not to mention the annoying seals; sea gulls and herons crap on your windshield; all the good walks are too long; you have to slam on the brakes for Box Turtles crossing the roads; you will get covered with mud digging your own clams and collecting your own oysters, and you will slice up your hands opening them; etc., etc.
Worse still, with the rapid rise of the oceans due to your car, it will soon be underwater (maybe in 3000 years). So don't buy out there. It's a big, temporary sandbar left over from the last Ice Age.
My girls spent the weekend practicing skeet and trap at a friend's club (they like guns), then they had a jolly overnight in NYC gallivanting around wherever young folks gallivant these days.
Do they know the NYC subways? Do fish pee in your reservoir? Well, they know the Manhattan and Brooklyn trains anyway. I think they know the cool clubs too.
It's a pleasure to a Dad when your kids get along, because you want them there for eachother when you're gone. My lad is preoccupied with his own pleasant chores, although I could use some spare young muscle.
I spent the weekend doing what I enjoy most: heavy manual labor around the farm's decorative grounds (the decorative parts, not the rough parts). I dedicate a weekend each late Spring (and one day in March) to these seasonal jobs, before it gets too warm and all you want to do is to sit on a Farmall tractor with a cold one. First the chain saw work, then the clipper work, then the hedge-trimming, then the major weeding. Mrs. BD does the less-heavy weeding and pruning, being more obsessional than I am. And she likes to tell me where to move plants. Not a bad deal to be my wife despite my occasional crankiness.
Then the damn clean-up. It's the work Americans supposedly won't do. Well, I could use some immigrant help to get everything done on my list...
So what's for Father's Day supper? My favorite meal, or close to it - Vitello Tonnato - cold sliced veal with tuna sauce (with arborio rice and salad - arborio rice isn't just for risotto. You cook it in chicken broth). Great, strong flavors in the sauce - capers, anchovy, tuna. Need to make it hours, or a day, in advance. Mrs. BD likes to make it.
It may be sneaky, cynical, and seems like a unconstitutional abuse of power, but this is hardball politics being played here. It's a power play, to mix metaphors.
Here are the clever parts: Obama preempts Rubio's plan (they want to kneecap Rubio), it helps with some key states, and anybody who opposes the idea seems cruel (it's not as if most Americans worry about Constitutional nuance - mostly people seem to just like an idea, not like it, or not care).
So whether his proposal ever comes to pass or not, Obama has called "Check!" on the Hispanic and immigration issue. Maybe Checkmate on the politics of those issues.
He is following the plan to pander to each constituency, each "community" he can. Solidifying a possibly-wavering base of voters with goodies of all sorts, and conveying caring sentiments. Obama wants to win. I don't know why. I spose it's a sport and winning is the point.
Axelrod has lots of tricks up his sleeve. He's from Chicago so you cannot misunderestimate him. They play rough, and they cheat without qualms. See Obama’s policy strategy: Ignore laws. Laws are just a nuisance when there is so much at stake.
Most Americans do not remember the details of the Watergate charges and facts, if they ever knew them. Instead, the word Watergate has been used to villify President Nixon, most of what he stood for, and almost any scandal since is called a -gate. Fred Thompson was the Republican counsel on the Congressional Watergate Committee. In a look back that is important to read, Thompson reflects on the context, the charges, the findings and what the findings ignored. As the subtitle of the piece says, "Caricatures of the evil Nixon don’t help us learn how to counter abuses of power." Today, we still suffer, not just domestic breakins or coverups but the far worse wholesale usurpation of Congressional power by this President, the betrayal of allies, and the gross undermining of our national security. A taste of Thompson:
Today, the office of the president, along with the entire executive branch of government, grows with each administration, bringing less accountability and more opportunity for improper activity. Today, unelected bureaucrats tell states what they can and cannot do about the enforcement of their own well-established laws. Federal regulations run every aspect of American life,even as the Supreme Court regularly slaps them down. These actions on the part of the executive branch are not criminal, but neither were many of the arrogant and foolish things the Watergate crowd did. At issue here is not just a few bad individuals. At issue is the way power can be used and abused. Watergate was not the first time the darker side of human nature manifested itself, nor was it the last time.
Consider the issue of the inherent powers of the presidency, especially with regard to national security. It was activities in this area — before the crimes of Watergate took place — that are relevant and sometimes overlooked today.
What led to the Watergate cover-up was the fear that an investigation would reveal non-Watergate activities by the “plumbers’ unit” in the White House, which had been set up to “plug leaks,” among other things. Daniel Ellsberg had leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1970, and the plumbers broke into the office of his psychiatrist to root out information about him. They wiretapped reporters, even White House aides. The list of their offenses is long.
Oh, and remember, millions of lives were lost to the communist takeover of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, once the Watergate reaction put a large Democrat majority in Congress.
Growing Pell-Mell - The government’s program to help low-income students is out of control:
There are two major problems with the program: Not only has it expanded to cover more than half of all students, but almost anyone—regardless of academic background—can qualify. Recipients must meet only a minimal academic standard: obtaining a high school diploma or the equivalent. There are no minimum SAT scores or GPAs.
Consequently, many grant recipients go to college but flunk out or lose interest, often going deep into debt at the same time.
Like housing, government tried to orient higher education through a social engineering lens and “established Sallie Mae in 1972 to encourage banks to loan more money for college. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 allowed the government to loan money directly to students. The following year the Taxpayer Relief Act extended tax breaks to student loan borrowers. Predictably, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates at historically low levels, making college loans cheaper.”
In the meantime, “the price of a college education soared…[and] by law, lenders cannot even deny Stafford and Perkins loans (types of federal student loans) based on the borrower’s credit or employment status. What other reason is there to deny a loan?
Special interest avarice has no natural limits. A generation ago, economist Mancur Olson made the point that a special interest’s appetite has no limit because it gets the benefits while the costs are borne by society at large. This incentive structure means that the interest will keep grabbing even when the costs imposed on society at large far exceed the benefits to the interest. And its Washington representatives have an incentive to be even less reasonable, as they have to juice the troops to keep the stream of dues coming.
Some commentators are under the illusion that the current national crisis will sober up the special interests. But that is not how it works, because a crisis makes special interests less, not more, responsible. The situation becomes, in the language of game theorists, a “last-period problem.” As a game approaches an end, the players have no need to cooperate for the sake of protecting long-term relationships. Their incentive is to grab as much as possible before the game ends, or, to translate to the real world, before the society collapses. Do not look for crisis to bring out a sense of responsibility in the advocates for the interests.
Politics is all about such cases, but here's one for today: Big Sugar Wins in the Senate. Same old Plunder Politics, spreading the sugar around to buy votes and allies.
...as Eddie Palmieri told him, “You used Jewish musicians or you didn’t have a band!” And Tito Puente played bar mitzvahs....A bandleader and multi-instrumentalist, Harlow was referred to by the New York Times as “one of the most important figures in the history of salsa.”...
While in college, I bartendered at Brooklyn's St. George Hotel during huge Puerto Rican dance concerts (sweet smoke billowing from the bathrooms), listened to Puerto Rican music on the radio while cramming, and was fluent enough in Spanish to work in a store in a neighborhood with a large Puerto Rican population (rapid fire Spanish). Funny, they didn't look Jewish! -- BTW, Puerto Rican stew is the best, with tropical ingredients. Try it, you'll like it. Ess up.
Probably for confidentiality reasons, Dr X took a fictional character as a sample rather than trying to camouflage a real patient. This is my idea of a real diagnostic impression of a patient without a major illness (eg dementia, schizophrenia, narcotic addiction, melancholia and major depression, bipolar disorder, etc.).
He briefly covers the defensive structure, the character structure, the basic conflicts as they relate to the person's life. Outside the major ailments, the DSM is useless in depicting a patient - a person with his flaws and weaknesses. In these times of the the low-rent superficial, check-list, cook-book Psychiatry, I find internists often more interested in the whole person than some Psychiatrists who just want to give you the right pill without delving into your psyche beyond the surface complaint. In my view, that is not serious medical practice. I do not approve of it, nor do I think it is cost-effective in the end. Some people are attempting to hyper-medicalize and simplify my field of work, but the human soul is too complex for that to work most of the time.
My field is deeply divided these days. It makes things interesting, controversial, and sort-of fun.
Unlike Dr. X, I never write these things down anymore. It takes too much time, can be subpoenaed and distorted in divorce court (some bad experiences with that before I quit writing things down), and otherwise nobody will ever read it before it is shredded. However, I store them in my brain. My brain has plenty of storage capacity.
I will re-post, for those who might be interested, my series on serious diagnosis over the next few days.
Character is destiny. Mostly, except for bad luck.
Well, first for your cigarettes, then salt, then your french fries, then your cokes. Now your cigars.
What next? What next?
The biggest problem with America is a too big, too power-mad, overweening government which refuses to leave the people the heck alone to make their own choices in life.
It's a sickness, the desire to control one's fellow adults. What neurosis motivates such things? A normal American detests such jerks, by homeland instinct.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
Our readers know about Rawley's old hot dog joint in Fairfield from Gwynnie, but this is as good - better for seafood fans:
We probably don't eat as many hamburgers as we should, here at the Farm, but I am planning a friends and neighbors cookout for around 30 people and thought I would do some research on the best burger recipes.
I considered asking readers what crimes they may have committed, but figured few would respond despite the fact that we all have made dumb mistakes. (See 
Like a cross between a kayak and a surfboard. Probably invented by cavemen on logs, but new again.
It's difficult to study something that nobody can define in a non-circular way. From McCloskey: 
From DeLong in
Well, first for your cigarettes, then salt, then your french fries, then your cokes. Now 