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.
People taking pictures of themselves has become a kind of 'normal' thing with the advent of the smartphone. Teens seem to do it regularly, and even the president takes part (which seems to give the practice validity, though he is very consumed with himself). The term 'selfie' has been added to the the dictionary and this self-indulgent practice has spawned a number of YouTube compilations. Some really are just self-indulgent. Others are well-designed and give insight. Still others have an artistic bend to them. But each has two things in common. The first is it is taken by the subject, the second is it is about the subject as an individual.
While the concept of taking regular pictures of a subject is not new, the ease with which it can be done (particularly on an individual level) has improved. As a project for an artist, however, it can yield intriguing results. Nicholas Nixon's study of the Brown Sisters provides a tremendous view of how a subject group, in this case a family, progresses through time. I am not sensitive enough to be moved to tears, though others have been.
My wife and I had very different reactions to the pictures. She focused on the items mentioned in the article, all of which are intriguing. I looked at the individual pictures, seeking to find indications of change and age. While each picture shows differences, I was of the opinion noticeable changes started appearing somewhere around the 16-20 year mark.
For me, speech about criminalizing incorrect speech amounts to fighting words. It provokes me towards evil, defiant ideas.
But maybe it can be taken further. Forget speech, how about criminalizing incorrect but unspoken thoughts? Government doctors and neuroscientists could decide who is guilty. "If my thought-dreams could be seen they'd probably put my head in a guillotine, but it's all right, Ma..."
Let him without thought crime cast the first stone.
It's always been my view that difficult experiences can eventually result in painful psychological growth as often as they can result in lasting damage. It used to be called the School of Hard Knocks but I call it "Reality Therapy," and it's all the therapy most people ever get.
Psychotherapy, in it's most penetrating and exploratory forms, is nothing more than controlled psychological trauma, just as surgery is controlled physical trauma.
Every Catholic university has its own story. But the basic dynamic tends to be the same. For all their good intentions, most Catholic administrators are hopelessly confused and inconsistent when it comes to the goals of education. Just talk to a Catholic dean or college president. They do not want non-Catholic students to be “uncomfortable,” and they want everyone to feel “included.” Then, not a minute or two later, the conversation shifts, and the very same proponents of inclusion will insist that we need to challenge our students with critical thought and diverse perspectives. Hello! You can’t have it both ways—making students comfortable and challenging them.
A (very) Liberal/Progressive friend of mine sent me this article to get a rise out of me. I sent him a quick response, pointing out it would take more time to explain why this author is so terribly misguided. Thankfully, that's why blogs exist.
The author, Eduardo Porto, makes the claim "Elected governments are certainly imperfect. But to address our most intractable ills, they are the better tool." I wonder if this is something he'd have written if Bush were in the White House? Doubtful. More importantly, it's worth noting 'government as a tool to fix ills' is a common Progressive claim. It's also one which is completely misguided since it relies on having 'the right people' in office. If the wrong person or people are in charge, Progressives (and Conservatives) who believe government is a 'good' claim "government is broken" or "the wrong people are in charge." The first claim is most likely true regardless of who is in office. But if these claims are true, does government suddenly get fixed when the 'right' people are in charge? Certainly not!
If your system of righting perceived ills requires having 'the right people in charge', you have devised an awful system of governance. It's unlikely the right people can ever be in charge.
What really galls is his belief that an imperfect elected government is the best resource for fixing any perceived ills. Porto seems to have no problem with the 'right' politicians getting wealthy as long as they strike a stance which he support - opposition to businessmen getting wealthy because they provide consumers with beneficial products. It's easy to ignore that, for the last 6 years, with people I'm sure he considers 'right' being in place, Porto's perceived societal ills caused by business have gotten worse. After 6 years of His Wonderfulness being in charge, this journalist is still writing diatribes about how awful things are, or how awful they are becoming. Why has he not stopped to consider the complete and utter uselessness of our Empty-Suit-In-Chief? The 'fix' he voted for has failed him miserably, and he is miserable because he knows it, so he's complaining that the 'fix' was improperly applied. In fact, it was applied properly and it's just plain unworkable. Government is an ineffective method of generating social change, regardless of the 'right people'.
I was recently driving from New Haven to Boston and picked up the first hitchhiker I've seen in quite a while. He was hitching to Augusta, Maine, a Navy guy on leave.
I asked him why he did it. He told me had hitched since his early teens, and just liked it. I told him I used to hitch all over the Northeast, mostly going to see gals. Nobody gave me use of a car when I turned 16, or even when I graduated from college.
It seems to me that hitchhiking in the Northeast is a disappearing tradition. Too bad - it was a good thing, always interesting, but maybe that was a more innocent era.
Bulldog and I have been working on this for a while.
The plan is to hike from the Battery - South Ferry - to Central Park South. Or maybe vice-versa - we'll let you know details. However, it will be a somewhat meandering route so as to capture some fun sights and neighborhoods, and some cool locations, and for some fun beer/water and/or bathroom stops. We'll post a map of our route in advance.
As a result, it could be a 7-miler, a bit tiring for some but it's mostly all flat. We have no time frame for the hike (maybe 10 AM, until done). Totally doable in comfortable shoes. Cameras are good. If needed, we'll have a leader with an ISISSicilian Mexican American flag! Nobody to give talks, though.
Be there or be square. It's like, you know, like totally worth a trip to the city. Grab a hearty breakfast, because we aren't stopping for food. Backpack snacks if you need 'em.
Rain, snow, shine, or fire-and-brimstone. Bulldog and I will be there, News Junkie, family members, friends, and whoever, at the start. Join us, whether a Maggie's reader or not. We are friendly (and we do not care about your politics or your religion).
Details to you if interested in a group hike - just leave your contact info in the comments below, or we will post further details soon. Yes means Yes, but not maybe.
I'm not ashamed of the fact that I've been laid off 4 times in the last 20 years. I work in a business which has undergone significant transformations in the last 15 years and it is particularly sensitive to recessions. More importantly, it is an industry which has engaged and embraced 'diversity' as a goal, meaning the supposed benefits of being a white male (which were slim to begin with) are more or less nonexistent today.
2 years of unemployment over a 20 year period isn't too bad when you consider how many people are still looking for steady work since 2008. I have a number of friends who have left this industry and entered new careers. It's tough to start over when you're past the age of 45. Which is why I'm glad I'm working and complain very little about my job. I make less than others with similar experience to mine, mainly because each bout of unemployment forced me to rearrange my salary needs and alter spending patterns. This is unfortunate, now that I have 2 kids in college, but it's good, too. I'm less likely to face the ax again since my experience comes cheap.
But I haven't been around Maggie's lately, and it's because I've had issues I'd classify as "First World Problems" over the past few months, which are better than the alternative "Big Problems". But it's worth sharing one in particular because it may help others with perspective, and it sure helps me with dealing with it.
At least in the northern climes, it's the last chance to aerate or plug, overseed, and fertilize if you want a half-decent "grass garden" which is suitable for walking and dog abuse. As I always say, lawn grass is a garden. It's not natural, and needs care just like any garden. Lawns benefit a great deal from fall fertilizing. If lawns are walked on at all, they require aerating. It's not a rug. If you have a small lawn, you can do that by hand with a hand aerator or a spade: stick it in, wiggle it, and pull it out.
A Spring or Fall aeration or plugging, a Fall overseeding, and three fertilizations per year ought to be good enough for any grass lawn, with or without irrigation but using a mulching mower. Readers know that I top-dress in Spring, but it might not be necessary for everybody. I like doing it.
(The only purpose of irrigation is to make a lawn green when it doesn't want to be green. It's fine for ahow, but spray paint might be cheaper.)
I advise doing those chores all at once. Do it now, and if you have a crabgrass problem, you can deal with it in the Spring with crabgrass-preventer. (You can't overseed and use crabgrass-preventer at the same time because the weed-preventer will prevent germination of your grass seed.)
Best, most logical plan? Minimize your lawn and grow lots of trees and shrubs, and mulch the heck out of them. It's a shame that the "gracious lawn" became the American Way, as if our little 1-2-acre plots were English estates. Heck, all anybody needs is room for Croquet and Badminton, some walking paths and maybe a cool little putting green, but the American lawn has become the expected standard.
On the domestic front, the travails of Obamacare suggest that for the first time in recent memory Americans are coming face to face with a new entitlement they don't like. And a political storm has been gathering over the budgetary costs and pension entitlements of state and city workforces. In three very different policy realms--foreign affairs, social welfare, state and local entitlements--a similar discontent is evident: an anti-progressivism that is in some ways the antithesis of the Progressive movement of a century and more ago.
Political entities and boundaries come and go. They should never be frozen in history, because so many are accidents of history anyway. Should powerful empires, crazy-quilt conglomerates - China, Russia, the EU, maybe the USA - devolve? Why not? Would it be worse, or better?
In the US, I can easily see California and Texas as their own countries. They were never envisioned at the beginning anyway. Either one would be more of a nation than Canada, Australia, or Austria. Smalleer governments are more accountable and more responsive.
Even Spain could break into its constituent parts if the empire permits a vote.
Many articles I read about Jihadists refer to "disaffected youth," even this one about the Algerian beheading of the French hiker.
I am sorry to say that these are not "disaffected youth" (as if they were Holden Caulfields or Benjamin Braddocks), they are deeply "affected" people from all walks of life who do not mind dying for their beliefs. They are true believers, Muslim fundies following their scripture and their religious leaders. Any efforts to psychologize them are amateurish, naive, ignorant, and Western cultural-centric.
Multicultural dogma says that we must comprehend people in the context of their cultures, not in the context of our materialist, secular, and therapeutic culture.
Well, nobody. However, it doesn't matter because the regulators are our moral and intellectual superiors like Cass Sunstein. Philosopher-Kings, you might say, or experts.
I am more from the William F. Buckley Jr school:
"I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."
The regulation-maniacs assume, of course, that we common folk have no sense, no information, and few morals, and constantly need their guidance, rules, and laws. Most of them, I suspect, have minimal contact with us regular folks.
Modern skepticism about rationality is largely motivated by years of experiments on cognitive bias. We are prone to apparently irrational phenomena such as the anchoring effect (if we are told to think of some arbitrary number, it will affect our snap response to an unrelated question) or the availability error (we judge questions according to the examples that come most easily to mind, rather than a wide sample of evidence). There has been some controversy over the correct statistical interpretations of some studies, and several experiments that ostensibly demonstrate ‘priming’ effects, in particular, have notoriously proven difficult to replicate. But more fundamentally, the extent to which such findings can show that we are acting irrationally often depends on what we agree should count as ‘rational’ in the first place.
It's an interesting article. I have always figured that humans are partly and sometimes rational and practical, often emotional, frequently uninformed or misinformed, etc. etc. I feel the same way about the regulators who seem to me to be irrationally obsessed with the idea of controlling others to try to make the world fit their fantasies. I'm sure Psychiatry has a term for that tendency. After all those who like to regulate are heir to the same human foibles and temptations as everybody else. Just more grandiose in their self-esteem and less humble and self-doubting.
Barack Obama’s address to the U.N. General Assembly was so insubstantial, so full of airy platitudes, and so adulterated with the gaseous clichés of bankrupt internationalism and progressive bromides that I thought at any minute he might just float away.
My explanation: He has already retired. Job is too easy. Also,
This speech proves once again that Obama is not a serious man. His badly trained mind is a warehouse of the sort of leftist and progressive received wisdom and dull clichés that pollute our universities, media, and popular culture. He represents the moral idiocy and fashionable self-loathing that signals to our enemies and rivals that the United States can be had.
Complain to me if this is not the best and simplest chicken you have ever had:
Have the butcher de-bone Cornish Hens - aka Spring Chicken, aka Poussin, aka a small chicken (1 per person, or maybe 1/2 per person).
Marinate in bottled Italian dressing for around 5 hours or overnight. Try to squash them flat in the marinade. Then squash the boned birds to spread out flat on a charcoal and/or wood fire, season with salt and pepper, several minutes per side, until the skin is crispy.
Never overcook a bird - they dry out. Chicken needs a little pink in the middle of the breast. If you want, you can brush some more vinaigrette on it while grilling.
Serve on a bed of mashed taters with garlic spinach on the side.
De-boning a bird takes practice, but butchers are quick, generally no extra charge. You can do this with a large chicken, but it won't be as good.
My chef friend/advisor says that one should never cook any bird without marinating first, unless it's in a stew.
Rosh Hashanah, which begins tonight, is the first of the intense ten Days Of Awe (or Repentance) that ends with Yom Kippur. Is ten days enough time to make good on our better selves and set a course for a better year and life ahead? For some it may be. For most of us however, it takes many years to set ourselves straight with others and with G-d’s desires for how we should live. It really doesn’t matter as long as you get there. What does matter is the realization that every day that goes by without thinking about it, without in some way working at it, is time lost forever and opportunities lost forever.
Shana Tova Umetukah is the traditional greeting at Rosh Hashanah. It means I wish you a sweet and good New Year. It is up to you to make it come true.
Genetic studies suggest that these major psychotic diseases, historically grouped under one broad category, are possibly or even likely different diseases.
This is not surprising, but it is interesting. "Schizophrenia" really meant miscellaneous chronic psychosis. We have all always felt that the paranoid psychoses were a different animal. Time will tell whether this information will have any practical value.
Why Girls Tend to Get Better Grades Than Boys Do - New research shows that girls are ahead in every subject,
including math and science. Do today's grading methods skew in their
favor?
Does this question require research? Anybody who has ever sat in a classroom knows why.
At Aeon, Earth is not a garden - Some of the world’s most powerful conservationists are giving up on wilderness. They are making a big mistake. A quote:
The garden metaphor is particularly loaded. A garden is not an ethical place. Life and death occurs at a gardener’s caprice. Plant or cut, tend or kill, include or exclude: it’s an exercise of morally unconstrained will, fine in a backyard but requiring boundaries both literal and philosophical. ‘Once we shift to a gardener’s mindset, it gives us too much freedom to do whatever we want,’ says the bioethicist Gregory Kaebnick. ‘And I’m speaking as an avid gardener.’
In a garden, there isn’t necessarily a sense that life has any value apart from what we assign. Neither individual beings nor larger entities – populations, communities, species, ecological processes – are intrinsically worthy of respect. The gardener ethic can’t account for that. What Leopold so eloquently advised, that we think of ourselves not as conquerors of life’s communities but as ‘plain members and citizens’, goes out the window.
My neighborhood sweep stopped by yesterday for a routine cleaning, and informed me that I had some creosote glaze in the flue. (Like me, many of us up here burn firewood in our fireplaces daily, doing our part to fend off the coming Ice Age and to provide homey comfort and warmth to our humble abodes. The farm still has a good-sized mountain of hard coal in the basement to use when needed. You can just throw a few hunks on the fire if you want to.)
It's not not a good thing to have creosote glaze, because a sweep's brushes cannot remove it and it presents a chimney fire risk. He blamed it on my habit of burning green and damp wood, but said that any long-used flue will accumulate glaze over time.
He proposed a treatment plan: Cre-Away powder and Anti Creo-Soot Spray. These things claim to change the glaze into something brushable. The active ingredient is a catalyst which degrades creosote.
It's a career for people who do not wish to work in a cubicle. Our guy charges $125 per visit, and $50 for each additional chimney. (We have 3, so it's like a doctor's house call.)
He says he tries to do 8-10 calls per day, so this retired fireman makes $1200+ per work day, and takes the entire summer fishing on Cape Cod with his grandkids.
I am convinced there is nothing they would enjoy more than to be targets of America. It elevates them. It's a booby trap, and beheadings are the bait. You can find as many justifications for attacking Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, or Saudi Arabia for that matter. The Jihad of the True Believers will never end, at least in our lifetimes. They are convinced they are doing God's work and do not mind dying for that. It's been going on for 1500 years.
As for borders in the ME, they are all bogus anyway. The concept of the nation-state is not really in their lexicon. Caliphate is - Kingdom of Allah on earth, won by arms if not by faith. It's a culture.
Related, the concept of the nation-state is relatively recent, and possibly obsolete: Did Industry Cause Nations?
No, not if you ask me. The more people are able to get out of their comfort zones, the better. Furthermore, the only brake I know to slow the rapid passage of time in life is new experiences, new places, new stimulation, new people, and new ideas. Otherwise, it can all just be a blur of same, same and, next thing you know, seven years have passed.
I am very much convinced of this effect, and would like to see the idea enter the lexicon. It's from this: 
I was recently driving from New Haven to Boston and picked up the first hitchhiker I've seen in quite a while. He was hitching to Augusta, Maine, a Navy guy on leave.
Thornton:
Complain to me if this is not the best and simplest chicken you have ever had:
We saw this on cafe menus frequently in Sicily, but never tried it (too many other interesting and unusual things to try).
My neighborhood sweep stopped by yesterday for a routine cleaning, and informed me that I had some creosote glaze in the flue. (Like me, many of us up here burn firewood in our fireplaces daily, doing our part to fend off the coming Ice Age and to provide homey comfort and warmth to our humble abodes. The farm still has a good-sized mountain of hard coal in the basement to use when needed. You can just throw a few hunks on the fire if you want to.)
- Boiled new potato with mint