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.
IQ is always an interesting topic. Ashkenazi Jews and Asians have the highest average IQs, and IQ testing correlates well with the SAT tests.
How genetic is it, and how moveable is it? Those are always studied and always in dispute. I always enjoy the company of people with higher IQs than mine, just as I enjoy playing tennis with more talented players.
How important is life "success" and life happiness to IQ? Not very much, I think, unless one aspires to being a Physics or Math genius. IQ is just one factor in a human personality but it is one, like height, which is readily apparent.
Newton’s wrong guesses are, however, as interesting as his correct ones. A well-known example is his conviction that light is made of particles, not waves. What he had in mind were solid ‘corpuscles’, not the photons of modern physics, but it’s still tempting to see him as having been half right. And in trying to explain the splitting of white light into a spectrum, he came up with the beautiful notion that the width of the coloured bands matches the mathematical proportions of a musical scale. People had traditionally counted no more than five colours in a rainbow, but for his theory to work Newton needed more, so he introduced two ‘semitones’, orange and indigo, and we’ve been counting seven colours in a rainbow ever since. Generations of schoolchildren have learned mnemonics that colour-code light, such as ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain’, which have as much to do with physical reality as the signs of the zodiac.
“How should we do x?” The main problem is not the answer, but the question itself, and the assumptions behind that question, the belief that an answer exists.
Some policies must, by their nature, be implemented at the national level. If you’re going to have a sovereign nation-state, you need a national defense apparatus (which is not to say you need our national-defense apparatus; there are alternatives), and you probably need a national immigration policy, etc. The basic architecture of the current American constitutional order, which is a remarkably wise and intelligent piece of work, contemplates national policies in those areas in which the several states interact with foreign powers and in those cases in which the states cannot coordinate efforts or resolve disputes among themselves on their own. That, along with some 18th-century anachronisms (post roads, etc.) and some awful economic superstitions (political management of trade, a political monopoly on the issuance of currency), constitutes most of what the federal government is in theory there to do. That and fighting pirates and others committing “felonies on the high seas,” of course, which is awesome, and we can all feel patriotic about fighting pirates.
But . . . if we look at federal programs by budget share, almost nothing that Washington does requires a national policy. There’s national defense, of course, at around 20 percent of spending; you may believe, as I do, that that number is probably too high, but national defense is a legitimate national endeavor. But most federal spending is on various entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and various other welfare benefits. There is not much reason for any of these programs to exist at all — government is a criminally inept pension planner and a thoroughly incompetent insurance company — and there is very little reason for any of them to exist as uniform, one-size-fits-all national programs. Start digging into that non-defense discretionary spending and you end up with very little more than a catalog of crony payoffs and political favoritissm.
There is no more reason to believe that a single government-run pension scheme is in each individual’s best interest than to believe that a single city or single model of car is right for everybody. And the people who design and plan these programs know that. The point of Social Security — like the point of insisting that health insurance is “a right” rather than a consumer good — is to redefine the relationship between citizen and state. That is the real rationale for a national pension scheme or a national insurance policy. For several generations now, we’ve been changing the very idea of what it means to be an American citizen. It used to mean being entitled to enjoy liberty and republican self-governance under the Constitution. Eventually, it came to mean being eligible for Social Security, functionally if not formally. Now it means being eligible for Obamacare. The name of the project may change every generation, and its totems may evolve from Bismarck to Marx to “the experts” — that legion of pointy-headed Caesars who are to be the final authority in all matters in dispute — but the dream remains the same: society as one big factory under the management of enlightened men with extraordinary powers of compulsion.
Bravo to him. I hate Washington with the aggrandizing, pre-fascist pseudo-Roman pretensions of that town, as if it were an imperial city with its statues, monuments, pillars, and memorials imitating ancient Rome. I hate the idea of a luxurious presidential mansion. I hate the pomp, the parties, and all of the government limos. I hate all the money that flows through there, tax dollars, lobbying dollars, legal dollars. I hate the idea of a "national art gallery" and a national theater and all those sorts of imperial trappings. I hate those giant buildings filled with bureaucrats with power over me. I hate the amount of power which is ensconced there. I think all of the grandiosity and money and power and scheming and careerism and celebrity is disgusting and un-American.
I even dislike Arlington cemetery. Those boys and men should be buried at home with their families, in my opinion.
George Washington would have hated his monument, and Lincoln would hate his. Those were humble men, not seeking idolization.
Who cares? It's their money to do whatever they want with it. They are free to just burn it if they want to (or is burning money illegal?) Mankiw is correct, though, about reversion to the mean.
... no matter what establishment voices assert intervention in foreign lands in a ham-handed fashion to prop up our American values is bound to lead us down a path of tears. As Shadi Hamid states the future of democracy in the Middle East is going to be illiberal. This may be inevitable. We don’t need to avert our eyes from it, and we need to acknowledge that so we were, so they will be. It took the Thirty Years war to finally purge the enthusiasm of sectarianism from the cultural DNA of Europeans (and even then, religious minorities were second class citizens for centuries). There will be no calm reasoning with Iraqis of any stripe because the march of history continues, and only sadness can convince all parties that moderation is necessary for the existence of modern nation-states. Intervention in some fashion may be inevitable in the world, but our goal should be to prevent hell, not to create heaven on earth. The former is possible, the latter is not.
Actively-managed equity accounts are widely considered a rip-off for the muppets. I am not rich enough to get into hedge funds, but I'd like to be because those smart folks can do far more than I can, hedging currencies, national economies, sovereign debt, etc. while the average Joe like me is stuck with mass market retail products.
I like to have money, and enjoy the concept of making money in markets while busy at my day job. I keep spare cash in a Vanguard bond fund, while my IRA is miscellaneous but mostly Vanguard funds with a focus on proven income-producing equities and some balanced funds plus some good (legal, of course) stock tips, and some cash for the next market crash, locked and loaded. I control my IRA.
I also have substantial debt in the form of a low-interest but fairly large mortgage which I intend to keep as long as I am able to work. As I have calculated it, keeping a mortgage is a net gain for me.
Most people want capital-preservation above all, but if you want risk to make real money in markets, do what monkeys do and use your crystal ball and pick the right stocks instead of indexes indices and buy low, sell high. After all, funds dilute gains. So hire a monkey.
What do y'all do with your spare cash and with your long-term savings?
Jefferson well knew that one of those rights—to pursue our own happiness in our own way—would yield wildly different outcomes for individuals. Even this most radical of the Founding Fathers knew that the equality of rights on which American independence rests would necessarily lead to inequality of condition. Indeed, he believed that something like an aristocracy would arise—springing from talent and virtue, he ardently hoped, not from inherited wealth or status.
In the greatest of the Federalist Papers, Number 10, James Madison explicitly pointed out the connection between liberty and inequality, and he explained why you can’t have the first without the second. Men formed governments, Madison believed (as did all the Founding Fathers), to safeguard rights that come from nature, not from government—rights to life, to liberty, and to the acquisition and ownership of property. Before we joined forces in society and chose an official cloaked with the authority to wield our collective power to restrain or punish violators of our natural rights, those rights were at constant risk of being trampled by someone stronger than we.
Portrait is the deeply-wise dead white male James Madison.To be an American, you need to know what he thought about this experiment in freedom.
Let's hope not. Actually the article is a critique of behavioral genetics, aka evolutionary psychology, as much as anything else.
Humans are a highly-sexualized sort of ape, with no estrus period as most mammals and even monkeys have (except for the "great apes" of which we are one). It's difficult if not impossible to determine what sexual behaviors are "natural" for humans because mental activity, fantasy, relationships, and culture are such major parts of being human. After all, rape, murder, theft, violence, pedophilia, etc. are all sort-of "natural" for humankind, and there are cultures in which monogamy is considered a mental illness or a form of infantile behavior. It's safe to say that the Western bourgeois ideal of lifelong monogamous marriage and the nuclear family is very far from "natural" despite being fairly effective for child-rearing and overall life stability in Western culture.
It also is safe to say that humans are the horniest of animals and, with our capacity for wild imagination and strange (by animal terms) sexual desires and fantasies, a rather insane species.
I entirely understand why eating tacos and drinking Margueritas on cinque de mayo is a racist act and offensive to lunatic grievance-seeking Latinas and Latinos who own that bogus holiday, but I still do not understand what is offensive about "redskin."
In the US, it's a silly narcissistic badge of something to be part redskin. I am 1/16th, can prove it, and I stupidly think it's cool.
Indians aren't really red-skinned. It was a term based on the habit of eastern Indians coating themselves with bear grease to stay warm in winter and, I think, other Indians decorating themselves with reddish make-up.
One of Bush's major errors was creating the Dept. of Homeland Security. Something like that was bound to become trouble in the future. It has produced a police/surveillance state which, I would suggest, no American wants: Has the Dept. of Homeland Security become America’s standing army?
What do traffic cameras on my semi-rural Main St. have to do with preventing another 9-11? Nothing, but they are getting a nice shot of me waving crazily at the camera as I park in front of the hardware store to buy a door hinge.
"Just stopping in to get a door hinge," I shout out to the camera as I wave. "Harmless errand."
You do not have to be paranoid to get creeped out by this stuff, and the NSA. It's not American. I would abolish it all. The FBI was enough.
I would like to make the case for giving due deference to ordinary human experience as the proper guide for understanding human beings. Such deference may be contrasted with the field of “neurophilosophy” (most famously, the work of Paul and Patricia Churchland), which is intent on replacing “folk terms” — such as “reflection” and “deliberation” — with terms that describe brain states. Needless to say, brain states are objective facts, whereas our introspective experience of our own mental life is inherently subjective. But this divide between the objective and subjective, between the brain and the mind, does not map neatly onto cause and effect, nor onto any clear distinction between a layer of reality that is somehow more fundamental and one that is merely epiphenomenal. For example, if you are told your mother has died, your dismayed comprehension of the fact, which is a subjective mental event, will cause an objective physiological change in your brain.
In light of this causal power of the mental over the physical, we begin to wonder if it is right to think of these two types of reality as layered, in the sense that one is more causally effective than the other. It would follow from this doubt that re-describing our introspective experience of our own mental life in terms of brain states is optional, in this sense: the choice of description ought to depend on what you’re trying to explain. Each description answers to a different sort of “explanatory request,” issuing from different realms of practice. The “folk” description answers to the realm of everyday human experience, and the brain description answers to the realm of physiological investigation.
Pic above is Eaton's Ranch in Wyoming, a place my Mom loved.
Lots of places to explore on this planet, but we do love dude ranches.What is a dude? - How the strange history of the ‘dude’ helps throw a light on why the West still feels like the real America
Dude ranches might be a bit phony compared to real ones, but if you don't have a friend with a real ranch in Wyoming or somewhere, they are great fun. We recommend dude ranch holidays in the American West. It sure beats DisneyWorld.
Yes, at least one wrangler always has a rifle. Horrors!
The three schools of originalism are... incomplete at best. The framers did not intend to enable democracy simply through the Constitution's open-ended rights provisions, nor did they mean to constrain it just through those provisions; both Balkin and his libertarian-originalist counterparts simplify their claims too much. Rather, the framers wanted to enable democracy, but they wanted to enable it specifically by constraining its excesses — and thus the presumption-of-constitutionality originalists also oversimplify the political theory of the Constitution. No construction like a "presumption of liberty" or a "presumption of constitutionality" can reliably be used in determining original meaning because the framers had to make compromises among the ends of government and the three grounds of legitimacy.
Instead of reading the Constitution through the lens of a single theory of original meaning, we should simply read it with an awareness of its compromises and philosophic inconsistencies. This may actually be what a more complete and true originalism would entail — that we interpret the Constitution without resort to any modern construction, be it a presumption of liberty, of democracy, or of constitutionality.
Ran into two dads I know well at the market today, all planning their happy day at the grill and doing their shopping. So social and cheerful at the market it was hard to get out of there. Do dads do all of the weekend marketing these days? Seems like it. We'll have only 3 BD family dads here at the HQ with my own dad having died less than a year ago, but this dad Bird Dog will do the cooking because it's fun to do. I do prefer using firewood in the grill instead of charcoal, like camping. I don't understand why people use charcoal - or gas grills - because wood burns very well. I blame marketing. Wood makes good coals but they do not last as long as charcoal. That's the challenge.
A BD daughter has set up croquet. Perfect.
Antipasto: Grilled fennel with lemon (finocchio), grilled eggplant slices, grilled potato slices - grilled then splashed with oil, s and p, and chopped parsley. Yes, raw potato slices are easily grilled. Primi: Couscous with mint and zucchini (Sicilian-style) Secondi: Marinated butterflied leg o' lamb on my wood fire with home-made mint sauce. Charred on the outside (let the flames come, and never remove the fat), almost raw in the middle. Side: Steamed spinach with oil and garlic Good bread with hard crust
Apple slices and cheese for dessert. No, I am not Italian at all even though this is classic Italian/Sicilian cookin'.
All Dads need is a little appreciation, a couple of books, and butterflied lamb on the grill - cooked by Himself, of course. We do Costco for lamb.
I toss the lamb into a small garbage bag in the fridge overnight (we marinate everything in garbage bags) with olive oil, a pile of chopped fresh mint and rosemary, chopped garlic, salt and pepper. Wine is optional.
Next day, toss on grill, and let the herbs etc burn into it. Unless you are Irish, cook only until red in the middle. Overcook it, and you have made a very expensive dog dinner (or an Irish feast). One cool thing about butterflied lamb is that the variation in thicknesses permits all preferences of done-ness. The thick parts should be rare.
Serve with a mountain of mashed potatoes and salad, and a Cote Roti.
If you require mint sauce, do not use the store junk. Make this - it takes 2 minutes, assuming that your mint patch is already overflowing. No dessert - you don't want to ruin the experience. Just go straight to bed with your books, dogs, and wife because you have to get back to work in the morning.
In my opinion, it's the only grilled food that approaches burgers and hot dogs for pure grilling joy.
“For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning—to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. Our reason has become an instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life. Philosophy itself has shrunk under the influence of our weakness for instrumentality…”
The only thing worse than a pugnacious atheist is a pugnacious atheist who has a fetish for scientism. In that light, Dawkins’ bemoaning of childhood fiction actually makes sense. Devoting an inordinate amount of his life’s work to empirics makes any man coarse. Facts are blunt and stark, while imagination can be bright and stirring. The greatest works of art and architecture produced by man weren’t the product of cold calculation. They were inspired by a volition that doesn’t take cues from controlled laboratory experiments.
Here's a good piece on scientism as a superstition.
If Ives’s music often falls flat in performance, does that make the music less great? For most people the answer is unequivocally yes. But it’s worth contemplating the example of three piano sonatas, all written within fifteen years of the premiere of Ives’s “Concord,” by three of the most important American composers: Carter, Barber, Copland. Each of these pieces attempts an epic statement, fusing popular music with the complexities of modernism. Each is more expertly composed than the “Concord”—better crafted, more transparent, more pianistic—and eminently practical in concert. But Ives’s sonata towers over them all, despite or because of its doubts, sweeping past the fine points of constructing a musical work to address the nature and purpose of music itself. And that is the injustice of art; sometimes all the craft in the world is trumped by someone with something more important to say.
There is nothing new there in the age-old nature-nurture game. Does it really need saying that people who are more closely related likely have more traits in common? "Race" and "ethnicity" are just words for common ancestry, like "distant cousins." Early humans spread around the earth, and bred with others in their own neighborhoods just like Darwin's finches. Naturally, differences happened but not to the extent of new species, but enough so that people recognize their cousins.
AA is a wonderful thing which has helped countless people, and countless patients of mine.
I have no idea why our internet friend thinks that we shrinks do not appreciate it immensely: Does AA Work? In fact, I have often said that there should be an AA for non-alcoholics. Its general approach could help people grow up even if they aren't drunks.
As we have posted in the past, the format of AA was based on a Methodist program for personal spiritual growth, and spiritual and emotional maturity.
Please give me the power. I promise to make everything new and beautiful for you ignorant little people who do not understand what you really want or what is best for you. Furthermore, I'll turn your slob husbands into young studs, your wives into Miss Americas, your bank accounts into mountains of gold, and I'll make the oceans recede by shipping water to the moon (with apologies to those with waterfront property).
If you think Delta is a mess, try partially-government-owned Alitalia...from Wiki:
On 3 May 2013, in a sting codenamed "Operation Clean Holds", police made 49 arrests at Rome's Fiumicino airport, with another 37 in major Italian airports including Bari, Bologna, Milan Linate, Naples, Palermo and Verona. All were Alitalia employees caught on camera and most were charged with aggravated theft and damage.[21] Hidden camera footage has been released showing employees rifling through, stealing from, and intentionally damaging passenger's baggage belonging to various carriers.
We'll fly them anyway. Travel is always an interesting challenge.
From Condemned to Joy - The Western cult of happiness is a mirthless enterprise:
The Western cult of happiness is indeed a strange adventure, something like a collective intoxication. In the guise of emancipation, it transforms a high ideal into its opposite. Condemned to joy, we must be happy or lose all standing in society. It is not a question of knowing whether we are more or less happy than our ancestors; our conception of the thing itself has changed, and we are probably the first society in history to make people unhappy for not being happy.
The Green fanatics tend to be irrational or, at best, factually ignorant. From Mead:
Too many greens take their science a la carte. Where scientific research tells greens things they like to hear, greens get all self righteous about “science deniers.” But whenever some poor scientist somewhere attacks a cherished green shibboleth, hordes of vicious and bitter green activists hurl angry accusations about the corruption of the scientific process by corporate interests.
We need solutions grounded in our best understanding of science, and we need to put those into practice. We need fracking, just like we need nuclear, just like we need GMOs. And we need an environmental movement that is realistic, balanced, and committed to the needs of human beings.
So: to save the planet, beat the greens.
"To save the planet"? I hope they are being a bit ironic there, and do not really believe that they will do that.
"Bob Benchley first introduced me to Ballantine Ale. It has been a good companion to me ever since. You have to work hard to deserve to drink it. But I would rather have a bottle of Ballantine Ale than any other drink after fighting a really big fish. We keep it iced in the bait box with chunks of ice packed around it. And you ought to taste it on a hot day when you have worked a big marlin fast because there were sharks after him."
- Ernest Hemingway
I remember when we used those green 40s for .22 target practice down at the farm's dump pile standing up at 40-50 yards. Not so easy to find tasty beers in green glass 40s these days. Shooting glass is more satisfying than shooting tin cans, and the big bottles are a little easier to hit.
I have always liked this ale - or whatever it is. Classic label, too. Give it a try, and think of Hemingway. It's cheap and good, if you can find it.
I am convinced that juicy fat is healthy. All science in the past 30 years says so, but before that the experts said fat was bad. 
Americans seem to want a little bit of both. 
When it comes to sex, will humans ever be 
I entirely understand why eating tacos and drinking Margueritas on cinque de mayo is a racist act and offensive to lunatic grievance-seeking Latinas and Latinos who own that bogus holiday, but I still do not understand what is 
All Dads need is a little appreciation, a couple of books, and butterflied lamb on the grill - cooked by Himself, of course. We do Costco for lamb.
From 
"Bob Benchley first introduced me to Ballantine Ale. It has been a good companion to me ever since. You have to work hard to deserve to drink it. But I would rather have a bottle of Ballantine Ale than any other drink after fighting a really big fish. We keep it iced in the bait box with chunks of ice packed around it. And you ought to taste it on a hot day when you have worked a big marlin fast because there were sharks after him."