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.
This is a 4 year old story discussing why reconciliation is "good", in particular as it applied to the ACA.
Now go to MoveOn.org and take a look at their scare tactics. MoveOn is trying to frighten Democrats and fence sitting voters into a misguided belief the Republicans will misuse reconciliation because reconciliation is "bad".
It is a certainty, as Lord Acton once said, that power corrupts. In many cases of political activity, that corruption isn't just apparent in bribes, graft or other rackets that take place. It's visibly evident in the hypocrisy of power. In reality, reconciliation is probably bad every time it is used. I say this because it was mainly designed to overcome filibusters. Filibusters exist in order to extend debate on contentious issues on which neither side can claim a clear and overwhelming majority agreement (read as "bipartisan" - a term I despise since I view it as a means to push a slow growing Progressive agenda, but which many people think is a "good").
Basically, both parties have plans and don't want the other side getting in the way. Each party has an agenda which is "the other party is bad and will only use these tools that I use to hurt you."
Fact remains, both parties use these tools to hurt us. While MoveOn's hypocrisy is on full display, the Republicans have hidden theirs slyly. Few remember their fight with Harry Reid, slightly over a year ago. Ancient history, to most folks.
If a system's success depends on having the 'right people' in place, there's probably something wrong with the system. As our republic is aging, it seems there is a distinct and overwhelming stench coming from Washington because both parties are putting people in place who are perceived to be the 'right people'. Yet things just keep getting worse.
America's founders never promised us a rose garden. Quite the opposite. They offered, to the world, a novel and very difficult life breathing the air of freedom and independence from government and any other powers.
Adventurous people from all over the world have been attracted to the ideas of dangerous freedom, opportunity, risk, insecurity, and self-reliance.
Those things bring out the best in people.
You all know all of this. In my view, if you want anything from the federal government other than legal justice and protection from invading powers, you lack the vibrant American spirit and perhaps might prefer to live elsewhere, where a more feudal state plays a more parental, controlling role. It's a big world out there and the American idea is not/was not for everybody.
American people do not have delimited rights. American governments have delimited powers. That was the idea and the ideal, anyway.
Freedom or rights for stuff rather than from stuff? It sickens my soul. Quit helping us, please. Our ancestors did not come here for help other than help from God and maybe from our neighbor if we had one. They struggled and endured freedom, and so should we all. "Gimme" is not American: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Gimmedat:
Lefty politicians wanted to get the poor and working class further hooked on the government dole. Republicans, for the most part, rallied against socialized medicine, with a hefty amount of cognitive dissonance telling them that Medicare didn’t suffer from the same deficiencies. The voting hordes were just as divided. Seniors wanted protection from government regulation of medicine, while demanding no changes to federal entitlement programs. Democrat voters were up-front about their desire: to force other people to pay for their goodies, which include health care.
We had 14 hardy souls on our tour today. It seems there were no hitches, except perhaps the late arrival of one of the hosts. That would be me, learning it's good to check the weekend schedules for work being done on public transit. PATH trains to World Trade Center were apparently cancelled this weekend, meaning Mrs. Bulldog and myself were forced to arrive via Christopher St. and take a cab down to South Ferry. Apparently Maggie's folk self-identify, and 12 people were already waiting for us when we finally got there without benefit of the little sign I'd prepared.
All in all, the trip was a success. We stuck to the agenda, with a few extra stops baked in, up through to Chinatown. After that, minor adjustments were made to accommodate individual needs and schedules. But we made great time and managed to take in a good portion of the city's major sites and neighborhoods.
I hope everyone had a great time, I know Mrs. Bulldog and myself did. We enjoyed the company immensely. It was great to meet so many people and enjoy one of the world's great cities on such a personal level. From Fraunces Tavern to Cooper Union and McSorley's (where one member of the group was proud to announce he'd celebrated his 21st birthday recently - lucky young man!), we managed to soak in the flavors of New York. I think the one thing that surprised me most was that Stanford White designed the arch in Washington Square Park. In addition, one of the statues on the arch was designed by Alexander Calder's father.
I'd like to personally thank BD and Mrs. BD for introducing us to the Campbell Apartment in Grand Central. One of the coolest drinking establishments in NYC that I've ever been in. I will return with friends and family...and maybe even a few clients.
SCARUS On our side like the tokened pestilence Where death is sure. Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt— Whom leprosy o’ertake—i’ th’ midst o’ th’ fight, When vantage like a pair of twins appeared, Both as the same, or rather ours the elder, The breese upon her, like a cow in June, Hoists sails and flies.
Poetic language is an intensification of the use of words. Prof Booth likes to look at the "physics" of poetic language. When a person gets into a poetry state, whether writing or reading, the mind can take over and let the inner physics of the thing just happen the same way you can hit a moving car with a snowball without knowing the math and the brain physiology of it.
I found this essay to be fascinating, and had to re-read it: Shakespeare’s Genius Is Nonsense - What the Bard can teach science about language and the limits of the human mind. One quote:
As a playwright and businessman, of course, Shakespeare had a serious interest in shielding his audiences from the mechanics of his verse. In addition to its concordance with the 16th-century concept of sprezzatura—lightness, ease, the ability to make even the most difficult things look effortless—a play crafted to maximize delight helped Shakespeare fill theatres in a way that a lot of visible sweating over the lines might not have. For every ingenious device that Booth describes in the verse, he brings as much attention to the effort that went into keeping it unobtrusive. His theory may explain the ineffable mind-states that poetry creates in us: poetic experience as the interaction of barely perceptible mental processes whose delicate, scintillating play is usually washed out by the spotlight of conscious attention.
What Booth so elegantly shows us is how Shakespeare can free us from ourselves. His lush, prismatic verse grants us “a small but metaphysically glorious holiday” from how we usually comprehend language, a holiday that is in turn “a brief and trivial but effectively real holiday from the inherent limitation of the human mind.” Rather than plunging into the abyss of not-knowing, we soar above it. We are not falling, but flying.
“Go to the most prestigious college you can” is revealed to be bad advice. Similarly, the obsession with increasing the numbers of “underrepresented” students at top schools in the belief that this somehow improves their upward mobility (and “social justice”) looks like folly. Our selective schools, in short, are not all they’re cracked up to be and graduating from one is no guarantee of success.
That is because, Arum and Roksa maintain, our entire higher education system has pretty much succumbed to a non-academic mentality: “Educators have increasingly ceded their authority to students, and administrators have shifted institutional emphasis from students’ academic and moral development to their personal growth and well-being. Empowering and catering to students as consumers has only exacerbated these broader and deeper changes.”
An academic resume may matter socially, but after your first job it doesn't matter much for career. We wish strongly to believe that an elite "education" provides a foundation for more life enrichment and a dream-fulfilling career, but as time goes by I have my doubts. If you really care about intellectual enrichment, the Great Courses is all anybody needs.
The "Gentleman's A" harms students in the end. Here's what he says:
In large, introductory courses taken by a substantial cross section of the student body the grade distribution at a typical college or university in earlier times might look something like this: A’s:15%, B’s:25%, C’s:45%, D’s:10%, and F’s:5%. In words, the meaning of the letter grades were given as: A=Excellent; B=Good or Above Average; C=Average or Fair; D=Poor; and F=Failing. Like so many other aspects of American society and culture, things changed very rapidly on the grading front in the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was then that what we now call “grade inflation” got its initial start and experienced its most rapid rise.
Those As in the liberal arts used to be expensive, but now you can get them anywhere. That's why it matters to do math and physics - to show what you really have under the hood.
I enjoy Schneiderman's posts, but this one is too black-and-white. He was Psychoanalytically-trained, and so was I. I no longer practice classical Psychoanalysis but I do a lot of what I term "Psychoanalytically-informed supportive therapy" which is sort-of what CBT is.
CBT, DBT, whatever. CBT is no big deal. There are always new therapy fads with new names but they all have one of two goals: glueing together someone who has become unglued, or carefully unglueing somebody who is so over-glued that they cannot live. Or something like that.
Not sure about anyone else, but gas prices around me have dropped significantly. As recently as 3 months ago, I was paying $3.45 per gallon.
Yesterday, I paid $2.92. Not surprisingly, prices vary from place to place. I'm in New Jersey and we tend to have lower prices. On my way home from Syracuse on Sunday, I paid $3.47 only 5 miles north of the Pennsylvania border. Had I taken the risk to go 10 miles further (my indicator said I had 30 miles left, and that is not very accurate), I could have paid $3.25 simply by crossing the state border.
Recently, there was an article about falling prices in the morning news links here on Maggie's. The suggestion was that US drilling was the driver. I wasn't sure this was accurate, because the numbers didn't add up. Here is a short article on what the other factors may be.
For conspiracy theorists, there's always the political manipulation angle: "Oil has fallen to $60 a barrel. Experts predict it will continue to fall until exactly one minute after the polls close on November 7th." --Jay Leno (election is the 4th this year....but it's all in the delivery).
... “the greatest tool to lift children and families from poverty is one that decreases the probability of child poverty by 82 percent. But it isn’t a government spending program. It’s called marriage.”
Statistically probably close, but a lot of unmarried people are likely either not interested, or are not desirable "marriage material." And sex material and marriage material are not the same things. Duh. Ref: Human History 101.
Poverty stats in the US do not take into account governmental or charitable benefits, both of which are huge and widely available to those who want them. The semi-voluntary poor, of course (eg grad students, recent grads, Maine Guides, new immigrants, beginning entrepreneurs, people who chose their own lifestyles to pursue happiness, hippies, starving artists, ski bums, people who choose the dole as a life style, etc) are not isolated from the stats so the stats seem meaningless to me. (Not to mention the pitiful people who work the system, game the system, etc. for a few extra bucks from the workingman's pocket.)
Few would refuse a gift of wealth obtained honorably, but I do not think pursuit of wealth is a major driver in American life, or in human life in general. Fortunately, and to the benefit of the rest of us, wealth is a driver for some highly talented people with commercial abilities (eg Derek Jeter, John D. Rockefeller, Jeff Bezos, Henry Ford, Steven Spielberg, Bob Dylan, JP Morgan, George Washington, Warren Buffet, etc etc etc).
The 15% in poverty measure is the number of people who would be in poverty if we didn’t help them by giving them money, food, housing and health care. It is not the number living in poverty. It is the number in poverty before we help them out of poverty. And as to the comparison with the 1960s, in the 1960s it really was the number in poverty after we helped, now it’s the number before we help.
"Poverty" is a political concept. Many people want free goodies if they are available, but sacrifice a bit of their precious human dignity in the process. As SDA always asks, "Why is there always a wide-screen TV?"
A real working man has every reason for pride in his work, regardless of wealth. Not sure what Bob was thinking with this weary but hopeful lullabye. Probably some part of himself. Try to ignore the images.
By taking a promising idea and making a hash of things, advocates of the Common Core paid homage to a long tradition in American education. What could and should have happened in 2009 just might still be possible. It would offer the surest way out of what otherwise looks to be a bruising war of attrition that will complicate school improvement for years to come.
Although that original vision still offers a potential path forward, the odds of the necessary course correction actually taking place seem slight. Indeed, self-confident Common Core advocates have not been inclined to acknowledge missteps or problems and are instead more disposed to double down on clumsy political machinations, attempts to impugn skeptics, and an insistence that everything is working out just as they intended. At this point, however reasonable the rationale for the Common Core, it seems increasingly clear that American education would be better off if this unfortunate, quasi-national enterprise had never made it off the drawing board.
Many otherwise prudent people, many of whom may have smoked marijuana decades ago when it was far less potent than now, have gone along with the increased legalization of marijuana. It may be so that for most consumers, who do not abuse it, the harmful effects are minor. However, for many the short and long term effects are not minor. It is ironic that liberal politicians who are so eager to stamp out smoking tobacco and who are so fervent about controlling other things many consume are supporters of marijuana legalization. Their reasons are either that they still do imbibe or that they see another source of taxes they can spend on their other notions.
A scholarly analysis of the research since 1993 done into the health effects of marijuana finds:
Research in the past 20 years has shown that driving while cannabis-impaired approximately doubles car crash risk and that around one in 10 regular cannabis users develop dependence. Regular cannabis use in adolescence approximately doubles the risks of early school-leaving and of cognitive impairment and psychoses in adulthood. Regular cannabis use in adolescence is also associated strongly with the use of other illicit drugs. These associations persist after controlling for plausible confounding variables in longitudinal studies. This suggests that cannabis use is a contributory cause of these outcomes but some researchers still argue that these relationships are explained by shared causes or risk factors. Cannabis smoking probably increases cardiovascular disease risk in middle-aged adults but its effects on respiratory function and respiratory cancer remain unclear, because most cannabis smokers have smoked or still smoke tobacco.
Conclusions
The epidemiological literature in the past 20 years shows that cannabis use increases the risk of accidents and can produce dependence, and that there are consistent associations between regular cannabis use and poor psychosocial outcomes and mental health in adulthood.
... it is Dawkins’s identification with Darwin that is most incongruous. No two minds could be less alike than those of the great nineteenth-century scientist and the latter-day evangelist for atheism. Hesitant, doubtful, and often painfully perplexed, Darwin understood science as an empirical investigation in which truth is never self-evident and theories are always provisional. If science, for Darwin, was a method of inquiry that enabled him to edge tentatively and humbly toward the truth, for Dawkins, science is an unquestioned view of the world. The Victorians are often mocked for their supposed certainties, when in fact many of them (Darwin not least) were beset by anxieties and uncertainties. Dawkins, by contrast, seems never to doubt for a moment the capacity of the human mind—his own, at any rate—to resolve questions that previous generations have found insoluble.
I know how complicated a question that is. Are we talking about a date, a party conversation, a friend, a one night stand, friends with benefits, a husband's pal, an affair, a boy-toy, a potential marriage, etc?
If one is fortunate enough to be an appealing female, you know that all men will consider the notion of having a romp with you. They can't help it. Indeed, it is a no-brainer. You are a love-or-sex object before they even know you. Your Mom taught you that oafs want their hands on your body, creeps want to sneak into your head, and gentlemen try not to be either oaf or creep.
Women do live in a somewhat different mental world from men. As a shrink, I know both worlds. I know that many women find physical attractiveness appealing, tall guys with masculine physiques and regular features, etc., but I'm not asking about that, or that alone. And I am not asking about "marriageable," with its implications of good prospects, money, breeding, cultural affinity, intelligence, knowledge, skill sets, potential to make a good parent/mate, etc. Seductive expert men who try to get into your head? Red flag, always - those are would-be Bill Clinton types. Many women are drawn to charming sociopaths, and they know it because it connects with their own flaws. Been there in youth, done that, recovered, as have so many young women.
I am just asking about general "appealing," like somebody you want to talk to at a party and feel drawn to. Readers know that I have always loved Atticus Finch and that I married the closest I could find who also had good genes, who has effortfully made a lot of money while I pursued my medical calling, and been a great dad, a very hard-worker, a boy scout, and a loving and loyal husband despite his own difficult imperfections. Lucky me.
I will start it off:
The traits I find quickly appealing and charming in men are courage, honor, manliness, humor, shyness, but a confident attitude towards life and an easy, relaxed deportment which says that they are comfortable in their skin. They like to play sports and to play with power tools, books, and guns. Those things are instantly appealing to women like me, chemically. You do not have to mate with them, but I can just like it the way you like that chocolate dessert that you do not need and will not eat. We are not animals, but we do enjoy some people more than others. Decent men are the same way with the charming women they meet and enjoy. Normal guys who are out in the world develop instant crushes several times daily just from a chemical reaction.
How about you ladies? What appeals to you, in guys?
There are at least two main trends in Psychiatry in the US nowadays, with a large area of grey in between.
At one extreme, there are those who practice as if there were neither mind nor soul, as if there were nothing to a person but a bag of chemicals.
At the other extreme, those who practice as if there were no protoplasm and nothing but a bag of conflict and developmental/situational hang-ups.
Both extremes suffer from some form of psycho-utopianism. Most of us come in somewhere in some grey zone, in a confusing and challenging grey zone which keeps our brains working hard. A zone of ambiguity and mystery.
My close colleagues and I tend towards Dr. Levinson's view: Psychiatry’s Underground Economy. (It's not mainly about money, it's about how we think about patients.)
The simulacrum is often defined as a copy with no original, or as Gilles Deleuze (1990) describes it, “the simulacrum is an image without resemblance”.[9] Baudrillard argues that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right, aka the hyperreal. He created four steps of reproduction: (1) basic reflection of reality, (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretence of reality (where there is no model); and (4) simulacrum, which "bears no relation to any reality whatsoever".[10]
The Trailhead Queen was dead. At first, there was no overt sign that her long life was ending: no fever, no spasms, no farewells. She simply sat on the floor of the royal chamber and died. As in life, her body was prone and immobile, her legs and antennae relaxed. Her stillness alone failed to give warning to her daughters that a catastrophe had occurred for all of them. She lay there, in fact, as though nothing had happened. She had become a perfect statue of herself. While humans and other vertebrates have an internal skeleton surrounded by soft tissue that quickly rots away, ants are encased in an external skeleton; their soft tissues shrivel into dry threads and lumps, but their exoskeletons remain, a knight’s armor fully intact long after the knight is gone. Hence the workers were at first unaware of their mother’s death. Her quietude said nothing, and the odors of her life, still rising from her, signalled, I remain among you. She smelled alive.
The deception was made easier by the fact that in life she had never given orders or led them in activities of any kind—even though she could have performed all their tasks if she chose. She had taken the only initiatives she ever took all in a burst, at the beginning of her adult life, when she had abandoned the colony of her birth and, along with it, her mother and her sisters. First, she had spread her four membranous wings and flown into the air. There, she’d joined a swarm of flying males and other virgin queens. One of the males had caught her. He’d clamped his legs around her body, and the couple had spiralled down to the ground. On landing, he had used the large claspers at the rear end of his body to hold their genitalia together as he completed the insemination. Within five minutes, the act was finished, and the queen shook the male loose. All the sperm she had received flowed up into a special bag-shaped organ in her abdomen, where it would stay until called on to fertilize her eggs. It might last for years into the future. Each sperm was endowed with a potential life span equal to her own.
In contrast, the father of all her children was programmed to die almost immediately after the mating. The only thing that he had ever done was accept meals regurgitated to him by his sisters, as if he were a nestling bird, and wait, and wait some more, and finally take the one short flight from his home, followed by five minutes of copulation. In other words, the male was no more than a guided missile loaded with sperm, his life’s work a single ejaculation. Afterward, he was left with only one instruction, to be enforced if necessary by his sisters: Don’t come back. He had been issued a one-way ticket. He had no chance at all of survival. A delicate creature, he could not find food, or feed himself if he stumbled across some. He would die by dehydration, or crushed in the beak of a bird, or chopped into pieces by the jaws of an enemy ant, or, less quickly, pierced by the bloodsucking proboscis of an assassin bug.
To escape the same fate, the newly mated future Queen of the Trailhead Colony, full-brained and powerfully muscled, hurried to find shelter. She had to get back underground as quickly as possible. First, however, she had to take a few minutes to shed her wings. To do that, she simply bent her middle legs forward, pressed them against the base of the wings, and snapped them off. This mutilation caused no injury to the rest of her body; it caused no pain. The Queen was a parachutist who slipped her harness upon landing. Now she could move more quickly to avoid the ants, spiders, and other predators hunting around her in the grassroots jungle.
Soon she came upon an open space between grass clumps, a small clearing at the Lake Nokobee trailhead. By luck she had found an ideal site to build a nest. She began at once to dig a vertical tunnel in the sandy clay soil. Her movements were swift and precise, and within minutes she had deepened the shaft to more than her body length. This provided her some degree of protection, but she needed to proceed as quickly as possible. Her life remained in constant danger.
My impression was that the "disease" model became popular for three main reasons; 1) it made it more comfortable for the addict, 2) it made it more likely to get insurance coverage for treatment and 3) addictions do have a physiological aspect. It never occurred to me that politics had anything to do with it.
We are remembering last September's trip to Northern Italy and the Dolomites (with a drive down to Verona). Pic is me - yer editor Bird Dog with well-used Osprey day pack - made in Dolores, Colorado. That pack has been from Telluride to Tunisia to Turkey, and lots of places in between.
I do not mind looking like an American tourist. In fact, I often try to, just for fun.
Everything in the attic, basement, and garage that has not been used in two years is on its way out today.
The attic will be emptied, completely. Nothing will ever go back up that attic pull-down stair, so long as I am alive. Will keep a few pieces of furniture that the kids might need when they find their own homes. Otherwise, total clean-out. A dumpster, and two strong helpers. Pancho and Ruiz, our good yard guys. "Nice house, but too much stuff" said Pancho.
Gave them nice tips - deserved it for sure.
Lots should probably go to Good Will but it's just too much trouble. Clothing, furniture, old kids' stuff, etc. If my legal immigrant helpers want stuff, they are welcome to it. I'm sick of my attitude of "I might need it or want it someday." Yeah, right. Will keep my Sawzall, tho. Best tool since the stone-age stone hammer. Chain saws? I use them frequently. Brio train set? A keeper!
If we lived on a busy middle-class street, almost everything would be taken by people if we put it on the curb. That's what my brother does with his excess stuff. Great set of 6 kitchen table chairs which I always liked, etc.
The way we Americans accumulate stuff is ridiculous. It expands to fill and then overflow the space - and then you can't find it even if you wanted to. That's why God, in his infinite goodness and wisdom, created dumpsters. Also, He created rent-a-tool places. Great. Why buy, store, and maintain something if you can rent it for a day or two when you need it?
Firearms? Well, I think I'll save all my spares for future grandkids. All most people really need around the house are a handgun, a deer rifle, a .22, a 16 ga. and a couple of BB guns for the little kids, but I do not even know how many firearms I have. More than I can use, for sure.
Update: It only took us only 5 hours to fill the dumpster over the brim. Found Mrs. BD's wedding gown, kept it (who knows, she might need it someday - it's a nice one and I can be a pain). Lots of keeper kids' books and keeper train set. And some antique oriental rugs I had stored away zipped up in mothballs and forgot that I had. Nice, but I don't need more rugs now. In fact, I already have a stash of very nice antique orientals waiting for my kids' use. They are not in fashion, but I love them. Especially the Caucasians. Well-worn but fascinating to look at.
Now just vacuum the whole attic, and it's done. Onward and upward with the autumn honey-do list...
America's founders never promised us a rose garden. Quite the opposite. They offered, to the world, a novel and very difficult life breathing the air of freedom and independence from government and any other powers.
Cooked up a large casserole pan of
Not sure about anyone else, but gas prices around me have dropped significantly. As recently as 3 months ago, I was 
I know how complicated a question that is. Are we talking about a date, a party conversation, a friend, a one night stand, friends with benefits, a husband's pal, an affair, a boy-toy, a potential marriage, etc?
My pal who returned from a couple of weeks in Zambia is quite the wildlife photographer.
