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.
It's a provocative article, and I'm not sure that I agree with it. It makes it sound as if people were nothing but victims of the "powerful." Today, as in the past, people have to construct their own lives. It must be true, though, that there are fewer "good, steady jobs" in the US for the semi-skilled (factories, farms, offices) than there once were. Most people do not aspire to a big career, just honest work and a nice family life.
Mint is a weed if you let it loose in your garden. It needs to be grown in pots, or out loose in a field but it is also one of the most pleasant flavorings which exist.
In the eastern Med, it's a major herb. In Turkey and environs, they mix it with yoghurt for a sauce for roast meat and fish. In Sicily, they served boiled taters with chopped mint. Quite pleasant, and an improvement on parsley. No recipe needed.
An occasional Mint Julep is pleasant, too, and I like to dry the leaves coated with sugar for treats on top of ice cream. Have to give those arabs credit for what they added to Med cuisine - but even more credit to the food explorers of the Americas: tomato, potato, squash, maize, avocado, peppers, beans, cocoa, etc., etc. These things were worth more than the gold, in the end, from a culinary standpoint. What the heck did they eat without those things?
Good friends have a daughter who will be starting at the University of Alabama this fall. The brilliant (math, physics, dance, violin - not Asian but with 800s.) kid would only apply to southern state colleges. South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama. She wanted a cultural change, a complete change of pace from Yankeeland. Good for her. Each one she applied to offered her a full scholarship to go, but the parents honorably refused any scholarships, feeling that they should go to those in need. (This family was all set to pay for Harvard, so they got a windfall even without the scholarship offer.)
Mom told me that the kid had already lined up her roommates via facebook, that she had already found sponsors for the sororities she wanted, and that she had already gotten her football package online. Mom told me she said something like "Honey, this is supposed to be school. Are you planning on studying anything?" This was not the kid she knew.
"I'll worry about the details when I get there, Mom. I'm gonna be a physics major and a performing arts minor. I know what I'm doing, so don't worry about me."
Tuscaloosa. I enjoy seeing what kids will do. It will change her life, probably for the better.
Change is good, or people get in ruts. Over many years, I think we finally found our right rut. It's about friends, interesting activities, a comfy-enough home to sleep in and in which to hang some pictures, a couple of horses and a barn, and a church home. It takes many years, many adventures and a few failures, to find one's right happy rut for the long haul. Even then, who knows what might come next? For me, I plan to work until I cannot.
The irony is that Core proponents’ overall objective—to get schools teaching more necessary and important things, and to encourage intellectual coherence in what is taught—is not bad, but good. Why they thought the answer was federal, I mean national, and not local is beyond me. Since patronizing people you disagree with is all the rage, I’ll have a go. The Common Core establishment appears to be largely led by people who are well-educated, well-meaning, accomplished and affluent, and who earnestly desire to help those in less fortunate circumstances, but who simply don’t know enough about normal people—how they live, how they think—to have made a success of it.
Also they don’t seem to know that intelligent Americans, exactly the kind who quickly become aware of and respond to new federal schemes—sorry, I meant national ones—have become very, very wary of Washington, and the dreams of its eggheads. How they could have missed that is also beyond me.
It's not as if the country had been begging Washington to tell them what to teach in school. Nobody asked for that. If the federal gummint thinks that we the people are retarded, then they should consider their own election.
Critics suggested not only that I be fired for my views but that I should be prosecuted for them, and that the government should ensure that such views are not published. Live-and-let-live is not the Left’s way, never has been, and never will be. It is not sufficient that transsexuals should be free to act on their delusions — the rest of us are expected to participate in them with unreserved enthusiasm, and the Left is willing to use the state to compel us to do so. To simply believe otherwise and to share those views in print is in the minds of many on the Left not only a social transgression but something that should be a crime. The belief that members of minority political tendencies should be jailed for their views is very much in vogue for the Left at the moment. Democrats in the Senate are seeking to repeal the First Amendment. All of us — conservatives and whatever traditional liberals there still may be on the left side of the spectrum — should fully appreciate the sobering fact that there is a nascent, popular, authoritarian movement among members of the Left that supports everything from censorship to literal, non-metaphorical gulags in which to imprison people for their political beliefs.
It's necessary to be fearless in the face of these jerks and lunatics. On further thought, "fearless" is not the word. The right approach is mockery, not courage.
I'm not a huge fan of food truck cuisine. I know it's all the rage, though. There are even movies being made about them, trying to cash in on the obvious: food truck popularity and James Gandolfino.
I will grab at least one dirty water dog in the Spring, just so I remind myself that this staple is what it's always been - a nice reminder of life in New York City. The only other food I eat on the streets is the falafel or gyro made by Falafel King over by Lincoln Center. Good food at a reasonable price.
I was unaware that food trucks had a long history in the streets of New York, though. Here's another brief history.
Like many if not most medical students, I spent some time at the VA hospital attached to the school. I did a thoracic surgery rotation and a psychiatry rotation there, at least. Also worked in their ER, which was inexplicably and redundantly separate from the general hospital's ER a block away.
The joint medical school-VA staff there were wonderful and more practically-minded than the full-time academics and researchers at the med school. They let us do things and procedures which the regular med center would never have let us do, and that was good experience. The patients, mostly WW 2 and Korea vets, but some Vietnam vets (they were still youthful and healthy then) were poor, on the whole, lacking in financial and overall life resources. There were plenty of veterans admitted to the regular medical center too but, at the time, I had no interest in how these systems worked.
Now I understand the the VA is plain old government medicine. Here's Charles Krauthammer, MD:
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: If you are non-ideological, if you brought in some experts and say how do you attack the problem right now? You give everybody on the list a voucher to go anywhere they want and they'll get their care within days. And if the budget won't hold it, then you do a separate appropriation. I can't see anybody in Congress who would oppose that. However, as you point out, this administration has been arguing for five years that the government knows best, it should allocate resources, and we won't even think of this.
And for the long-run, I think the question is this -- you know, this was started by Abraham Lincoln after the Civil War and at the time it made sense. But now that the country is so much larger, medicine is so much dispersed in areas of the country where there are other expertise. The budget for the VA is $85 billion a year, the number of patients is 6.5 [million] or so. Do the math. That's almost $10,000 a year per patient.
Why not have each of those vets get a voucher for $10,000 to purchase private insurance and to go anywhere? But of course an administration like this would never even contemplate that. But it is a question. If these problems are systemic and chronic, and they are from the bureaucrat structure of a government-run system, why wouldn't you contemplate voucherizing and privatizing it?
I heard one, and finally saw him high in an Ash Tree, while working with an outdoor work team on Saturday morning.
Probably breeding around here, but possibly passing through. His call is said to resemble that of "a Robin who had singing lessons." Great description.
This not-uncommon Eastern songbird, which likes deciduous woodlands, is like a large finch. They are even known to visit bird-feeders sometimes. The male is dramatic, while the female looks like a large sparrow with a large beak.
You can read more about them, and listen to their song, here.
It's quite a detailed story in The New Yorker about an attempt at top-down education reform by the experts: SCHOOLED - Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools. They got an education.
Yes, they got an education but nobody else did. That was $100 million thrown into the trash.
How many times have I said that here? Life is traumatic, at times it is a vale of tears. That's not illness.
From Lynn Jones, Each scar is different - PTSD has come to signify the moral, social and political suffering of war. But not all suffering is a mental illness
The strength of the populists consists in a certain naïveté. They actually believe in “democracy.” And they are all mystical “nationalists” within their respective statist domains. They think that the nature of the modern State can be changed; that it would be possible, for instance, to downsize it, to reduce taxes, to maybe pay down some debt, to make the agencies of the State responsive to their individual customers, more reflective of human decency, &c. In power, they confront the reality, of machinery vastly large and complex, regulations fantastically detailed and comprehensive, all backed by the power of written law, to be enforced when necessary by violence. And being crass, the best they can do is empty their chamberpots into the machine, here and there. They prove rank amateurs, and upon their removal from office, the “natural party of government” returns, to make some minor sloppy repairs, then resume the mission of Nanny Statecraft — with ambitious new programmes and departments to reward dependency, and crush the spirit of liberty and enterprise; focusing their efforts to make sure that trouble does not arise from the same quarter again.
The citizen of every modern Nation State is fully integrated with that machinery: strapped into place and identifiable by serial number. There is nothing voluntary in his participation: the definition of an “outlaw” has been amended over time, to mean specifically failure to cooperate with any government agent, or to surrender immediately to his demands. (I laugh, bitterly, when a media smartie proposes e.g. mandatory voting, as if adding more idiots to the electorate will improve anything. And yet I welcome it as a frank admission that democracy is a totalitarian creed.)
The final stop on our 2-week driving travels was Syracuse. I neglected a lot of Sicilian food in my previous Sicily posts, but I will catch up with that below the fold along with other interesting stuff.
The links to my previous Sicily posts in the recent weeks:
The mugshot is as much a part of everyday slang as it is an important part of police work. The concept of a mugshot, however, wasn't widely utilized until many years after photography was invented.
It began as the Rogue's Gallery, a series of pictures of New York's most notorious criminals, around 1857, some 20+ years after the first photograph was developed. No doubt as the cost of photography fell, the role of a photo as an effective police tool became apparent. It was a critical innovation of Chief Inspector Thomas Byrnes, a man known for aggressive police work, in the 1880s. Byrnes is also known as the developer of "The Dead Line" and "The Third Degree".
The Dead Line referred to an imaginary line drawn across Manhattan at Fulton Street, and based on the concept that criminals would be interested in the banks and jewelry stores south of said line. Any known criminal south of this line would be arrested on sight. In a day and age when 28 detectives were available to investigate the crimes among 2 million inhabitants, the money south of this line dictated policy.
Byrnes' most notable case was linked to one of the most famous serial killers of all time. Byrnes had claimed that Jack the Ripper would find it impossible to operate in New York City without being caught in 48 hours. Those wordswould haunthim.
I have a very optimistic long-term outlook regarding our society. There are moments, however, which question my resolve. This is one of them.
It's articles like this that remind me Jean Baudrillard was right and I realize this isn't reality. It is an alternate reality, though. It seeks to simulate what the rest of us live. Kanye may feel comfortable calling out people like George W. Bush, or anyone else he doesn't like, but it's pretty clear he hasn't been in touch with reality for a long time.
The real question is why people like this continue to get coverage. My guess is they fear slipping into obscurity, and the best way to avoid it is to be outrageous and 'make news'.
Since real news isn't important to many people anymore, people like Kanye and the Kardashians can continue to dominate. Analysis is meaningless, the only thing important today (and don't think Obama isn't well aware of this) is a good photo, a headline, some Tweets to your peeps, and positive coverage on "The Daily Show" and any other Comedy Central program that purports to 'deliver the news'.
Re-posted because I failed to follow my own instructions and my rhubarb patch bolted. Dealt with it today - a bit too late.
I am a fan of Rhubarb. It's tangy. Best rhubarb dish? Rhubarb cobbler with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
Rhubarb won't grow much in the southern US. It requires cold winters and does not enjoy long, hot summers. A good thing about the plants is that they are perennial and last for many years. In fact, a rhubarb patch will last forever if you divide the plants every few years. They are fairly heavy feeders and like a good dose of manure regularly. The leaves are so dense that a patch doesn't really grow weeds.
When I was a kid, my Mom had the rhubarb patch right outside the horse barn, and she would routinely toss some horse poop on it. The fresh poop did not seem to bother the rhubarb.
The only problem I have had with growing rhubarb is its bolting and rapidly going to seed. That needs to be prevented by cutting off the flowering stalks promptly before they grow tall.
Once upon a time, a friend of mine accidentally took over thousands of computers. He had found a vulnerability in a piece of software and started playing with it. In the process, he figured out how to get total administration access over a network. He put it in a script, and ran it to see what would happen, then went to bed for about four hours. Next morning on the way to work he checked on it, and discovered he was now lord and master of about 50,000 computers. After nearly vomiting in fear he killed the whole thing and deleted all the files associated with it. In the end he said he threw the hard drive into a bonfire. I can’t tell you who he is because he doesn’t want to go to Federal prison, which is what could have happened if he’d told anyone that could do anything about the bug he’d found. Did that bug get fixed? Probably eventually, but not by my friend. This story isn’t extraordinary at all. Spend much time in the hacker and security scene, you’ll hear stories like this and worse.
I have mostly exhausted my interest in posting about the complexities of the "mad or bad" topic but in this case, based on minimal evidence, I'd guess "bad."
Psychiatry has little influence over evil. That's for theology. Evil fantasies are things we (and everybody, pretty much) deal with routinely, but actions are another matter. The devil is stronger than we doctors are. Some evil is everywhere, from boardrooms to government to priests and pastors to teachers to cities to campuses. Please do not tell me that this kid had "PTSD," or an "anger management problem." Some people lack a moral compass almost entirely, but that moral compass spectrum spans from none to spotty to obsessionally scrupulous and fearful. We can deal with the latter relatively easily, but not the former.
The truth is that some people are "born to be hanged," and, at the least, removed from the gene pool. We too often piously imagine that happy and good are default settings for humans as if we could get everybody there with a rearranged psyche and a right environment (we term that "psycho-utopian"). It's an evil lie and an evil vision because it denies the existence of evil itself. My life, and history, have taught me that sin has great power. For all we know, violence, deceit, and destruction of good cheer are the default settings, and civilized behavior a special, difficult undertaking. That happens to be what Freud concluded, and he was smarter and a deeper thinker than I am. Not to mention many prophets, and Christ himself.
It is a positive comment on our level of Western civilization that we are surprised by gross acts of evil rather than taking them for granted. Quite remarkable in human history.
Good and evil remain the basics, as they always have done.
Addendum: I realize that my metaphors sounded as if I believed that evil is genetic. What I mean is that some people simply seem destined for trouble.
2300 Americans died in that invasion. Did the Sicilians want us there? Of course not.
At that point, I think it was the most massive invasion by sea in history.
I reflect on all of the historical invasions of Sicily by sea - the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Moslems, the Norman Vikings, the Spanish (barely an invasion), and the take-over by Italy (again, hardly a serious invasion but Italy did send military forces to annex Sicily). Uniquely, the Allies didn't invade to own it and had no aspirations to, but it was a strategic, temporary necessity.
(Reader reminded me that I omitted the Romans and the Byzantines. Too much to keep track of. Everybody wanted to own Sicily, and all of that history is still right there, right down to the Phoenician fortifications, the Greek temples, the Norman castles, the Roman cities, and the couscous and the mosques - and even Greek temples - converted to churches.)
Image is the historic flag of Sicily - most interesting flag in the world.
Pic is my caffe gelato and my caffe, and her nocello gelato just off the large piazza (to annoy Mrs. BD, just ask which way to the Pizza del Domo) in Ortygia during the passaggiata. Prego.
From Wiki:
The history of gelato dates back to frozen desserts in Sicily, ancient Rome and Egypt made from snow and ice brought down from mountaintops and preserved below ground. Later, frozen desserts appeared during banquets at the Medici court in Florence. The Florentine polymath Bernardo Buontalenti is said to have invented modern ice cream in 1565, as he presented his recipe and his innovative refrigerating techniques to Catherine de' Medici, who in turn brought the novelty to France as Queen consort, where in 1686 the Sicilian fisherman Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli perfected the first ice cream machine.[4] However, the popularity of gelato among larger shares of the population only increased in the 1920s–1930s in the northern Italian city of Varese, where the first gelato cart was developed. Italy is the only country where the market share of handmade gelato versus industrial one is over 55%.
Do you have to be raised Italian to know what the word "prego" really means? Probably. I've tried and I don't get it. It's used for answering the phone, and it's used when they deliver a gelato to you. Literally, I believe it is translated as "I pray" or something like that, so I think the connotation is something polite like "at your service" mixed with "you're welcome," "thank-you", "hello," and other things.
Pic above is the NYC central PO, the James Farley US Post Office. Once a beehive, now pretty empty inside the grand building. A temple to commerce, paper communication - and Christmas mail.
They are communal spaces where everybody goes - or used to. They employ many people who might not be easily employable elsewhere. They lose money, but so do schools, libraries, parks, highways, passenger rail, and the US Navy. Everything governments do loses money. Organizations and institutions exist, in part, to do things that are difficult or unprofitable to do otherwise.
Naturally, whenever large numbers people are involved, politics enters and, at that point, money mainly is about votes.
Why is the Post Office any different?
Well, perhaps it isn't any different. What seems different today is that many government civic "amenities" and "services" have competition from private operations who carry the risk, so taxpayers are less willing to throw their money away to governments who don't really worry about the money.
Parks are operated by operations like Coyote's, libraries have to compete with Kindles, government schools have to compete with charter schools, government rail has to compete with cars and air, and even the military hires tons of private contractors. Despite the massive increase in the size of government, there are more and more people willing to provide traditionally (meaning since the Progressive Era) government services more efficiently, more cheaply, and unburdening the hapless taxpayer of the risk of money-losing services.
The dirty secret about the "pure" golf game is the amount of cheating, not just in tournaments - amateur tournaments mainly - but also in everyday play.
So here are my questions:
1. Do you cheat? Do you play with people who cheat?
2. If so, how? Is a mulligan cheating?
3. How prevalent, or accepted, do you think it is?
Not as sweet as American ice cream. Mrs. BD likes Pistachio best, I prefer Hazelnut (Nocello - and you'd better say Nocello or they won't know what the heck you are talking about) - but I'll try anything to try to keep my weight up.
I'll bet anybody $1000 that Miami will not be underwater in ten years. Any takers?
Here's the scare headline: Miami Will Likely Be Underwater Before Congress Acts on Climate Change. Oh no - I'm scared. Not Miami! Not the US Congress! Yikes. Only Congress can save us from drowning. Or do they mean in 4000 years, when they do not realize next ice age will have lowered the oceans once again so that you can walk from Britain to France as they used to do before our SUVs ruined everything? I am deeply, deeply, seriously concerned, and it keeps me up at night. If you are not "deeply concerned" about something, there must be something morally wrong with you.
We all must become deeply, seriously concerned about something. Otherwise, what's the point of our existence? How do we otherwise justify it, right? We are foolish animals, me included. OMG, I think I accidentally ate a non-organic, GMO tomato last night. I am doomed.
Meanwhile, backtracking climate gurus warn that you should not expect their models to be correct. Not to worry, I do not and will not worry about models of any sort. All of the genius market models have been wrong, and those guys are much smarter than climate scientists.
It's still Spring trout season in the northern hemisphere.
Mint is a weed if you let it loose in your garden. It needs to be grown in pots, or out loose in a field but it is also one of the most pleasant flavorings which exist.
I heard one, and finally saw him high in an Ash Tree, while working with an outdoor work team on Saturday morning. 
From a brief, important, and depressing essay 
Since it's Sicily Month at Maggie's, on this Decoration Day weekend I am reviewing the 
The dirty secret about the "pure" golf game is the amount of cheating, not just in tournaments - amateur tournaments mainly - but also in everyday play.
Is there any difference, other than the surroundings in which you eat it - and the flavors?