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.
For Passover, a friend sent along his reminiscences of growing up Jewish:
Brisket is not the same as Corned Beef!
This goes back 2 generations, 3 if you are over 50. It also explains why many Jewish men died in their early 60′s with a non-functional cardiovascular system and looked like today’s men at 89.
Before we start, there are some variations in ingredients because of the various types of Jewish taste (Polack, Litvack, Deutch and Gallicianer). Sephardic is for another time.
Just as we Jews have six seasons of the year (winter, spring, summer, autumn, the slack season, and the busy season), we all focus on a main ingredient which, unfortunately and undeservedly, has disappeared from our diet. I’m talking, of course, about SCHMALTZ (chicken fat).
SCHMALTZ has, for centuries, been the prime ingredient in almost every Jewish dish, and I feel it’s time to revive it to its rightful place in our homes. (I have plans to distribute it in a green glass Gucci bottle with a label clearly saying: “low fat, no cholesterol, Newman’s Choice, extra virgin SCHMALTZ.” (It can’t miss!) Then there are grebenes – pieces of chicken skin, deep fried in SCHMALTZ, onions and salt until crispy brown (Jewish bacon). This makes a great appetizer for the next cardiologist’s convention.
There’s also a nice chicken fricassee (stew) using the heart, gorgle (neck) pipick (gizzard – a great delicacy, given to the favorite child), a fleegle (wing) or two, some ayelech (little premature eggs) and other various chicken innards, in a broth of SCHMALTZ, water, paprika, etc. We also have knishes (filled dough) and the eternal question, “Will that be liver, beef or potatoes, or all three?”
Other time-tested favorites are kishkeh, and its poor cousin, helzel (chicken or goose neck). Kishkeh is the gut of the cow, bought by the foot at the Kosher butcher. It is turned inside out, scalded and scraped. One end is sewn up and a mixture of flour, SCHMALTZ, onions, eggs, salt, pepper, etc., is spooned into the open end and squished down until it is full. The other end is sewn and the whole thing is boiled. Often, after boiling, it is browned in the oven so the skin becomes crispy. Yummy!
My personal all-time favorite is watching my Zaida (grandpa) munch on boiled chicken feet.
For our next course we always had chicken soup with pieces of yellow-white, rubbery chicken skin floating in a greasy sea of lokshen (noodles), farfel (broken bits of matzah), tzibbeles (onions), mondlech (soup nuts), kneidlach (dumplings), kasha (groats), kliskelech and marech (marrow bones) . The main course, as I recall, was either boiled chicken, flanken, kackletten, hockfleish (chopped meat), and sometimes rib steaks, which were served either well done, burned or cremated. Occasionally we had barbecued liver done to a burned and hardened perfection in our own coal furnace.
Since we couldn’t have milk with our meat meals, beverages consisted of cheap soda (Kik, Dominion Dry, seltzer in the spritz bottles). In Philadelphia it was usually Franks Black Cherry Wishniak (vishnik).
Gosh, I love this crazy city, but sometimes I like to get away from it for a little serenity. Then I get bored, and need to get back. As a country boy, you just need all that stimulation and hustle-bustle.
From my reading, it seems that New Amsterdam was more foundational to America than Plymouth ever was. And New Amsterdam was there first, as a speculative project of the Dutch West Indies Company. It was a wild and crazy multicultural tolerant, commercial place in 1623 and they mostly got along with the Indians. It is often omitted from the history that this is where the Pilgrims were headed.
This is the sort of crap that drives docs to retirement. It's called "electronic medical records," and it is essentially government-mandated in hospitals now. It is an incredible time-waster, and almost requires physicians to follow a script instead of focusing on you. Docs used to just note relevant positives and relevant negatives quickly on a piece of paper in a minute, and then practicing the art and science of caring about you.
"Care" is not an economic term. It is not a technical term. The "medical care" experts don't get that.
It's too late to keep corporate and government bureaucracy out of American medicine. We all must now just seek out physicians with the traditional, independent medical values, who work for you despite the intrusions. However, most of them will not "take insurance" anymore. They can't afford the professionally-trained billing staff.
I agree that ignorance of the law should be part of a defense except for the obvious crimes, because 300,000 laws is more than anybody could know or even understand. This is from Reynolds in USA Today:
"Regulatory crimes" ... are incredibly numerous and a category that is growing quickly. They are the ones likely to trap unwary individuals into being felons without knowing it. That is why Michael Cottone, in a just-published Tennessee Law Review article, suggests that maybe the old presumption that individuals know the law is outdated, unfair and maybe even unconstitutional. "Tellingly," he writes, "no exact count of the number of federal statutes that impose criminal sanctions has ever been given, but estimates from the last 15 years range from 3,600 to approximately 4,500." Meanwhile, according to recent congressional testimony, the number of federal regulations (enacted by administrative agencies under loose authority from Congress) carrying criminal penalties may be as many as 300,000.
I have seen plenty of marriages hit the rocks on those shores, but on plenty of other shores too. "Class" doesn't mean money in the bank. It means a shared understanding and approach to reality and relationships - and interior decor!
In relation to the economy, for example, Adam Smith placed ‘a due administration of justice’, alongside peace and easy taxes, as one of the three requisites for wealth. The other half of The Wealth of Nations are his recently discovered Lectures on Jurisprudence, first published in 1978. Smith wrote about how English law seemed in its certainty, its complexity and its concern with property to be ideally suited to be a foundation for commercial capitalism. He noted for that ‘there is no country in Europe, Holland itself non-excepted, of which the law is, upon the whole more favourable in this sort of industry.’1 He also writes of ‘that equal and impartial administration of justice which renders the rights of the meanest British subject respectable to the greatest, and which, by securing to every man the fruits of his own industry, gives the greatest and most effectual encouragement to ever sort of industry…
Mountain Laurel grows to 10-12 feet, and tends to be naturally leggy in its natural Northeastern Oak woodland habitats (see photo above). If it's "overgrown" that way in your around-the-house landscaping in places where it is meant to look green and full, it's because it was planted in the wrong place. It wants to stretch out, unless in full sun. With plenty of sun and rich, slightly acidic soil, it grows like this:
Another alternative is, again, to cut it down to about 6-10" sticks in the Springtime, and let it re-start its growth from the bottom. Regrowth, though, will take far too long for most people to put up with.
The same principle applies to leggy Rhododendron maximum, ("maxies").Come to think of it, also applies to leggy Lilacs. Shrubs get leggy naturally.
Those young fellows had talent, but came and went quickly. I hope they saved their $. I do know that one of them became an MD shrink. They all went off to do other things. Here's Desiree, reassembled with the NYU choir in 2012:
Now that we have finally been informed by our intellectual superiors that a real breakfast is healthier than fattening grains and fattening fruit, a new heresy appears to attack the dietary consensus: Breakfast is not important (unless you are a growing child or do physical labor all day)
Of course not. I thrive on coffee for breakfast, maybe with a cigar or some tobacco. A good diner breakfast, much as I love it on the rare occasion, puts me to sleep instead of giving me energy to do things.
Boring topics, I know. Boring only in part because those who write about them tend to be pure Materialists, assuming that money and bourgeois comforts are all that matter in life. I always find that strange from Lefties, but Lefties do love and envy money more than I do. As I have observed before, Maine Guides, NYC would-be actors, adjunct faculty, organic farmers, grad students, carpentry apprentices, etc. all are below the poverty level. They neither need nor want any sympathy.
I see no virtue in economic equalizing. It never worked anywhere, and efforts to impose it by force generally end up with plutocratic, privileged bureaucrats and a nation of serfs serving the State. Why ‘inequality’ can be ‘beautiful’. Furthermore, many people do not base their life choices on money but instead on things more important to them.
Poverty in the US? Let's define it first. The US has an extensive safety net able to contain the unfortunate, the feckless, the mentally-ill, the temporarily out of work, etc., etc. We even go overboard with disability, providing for people who could easily do something useful in the world but are working the system. Nobody in the US goes without food, shelter, and a big screen TV if they want those things. Notable also is that US poverty stats do not include any government charity or private charity contributions. Of course, family always helps out first, and that is ignored too.
Still, poverty will never go away as long as it is defined as the lowest x% of US income. I am still awaiting the official study which can tell me exactly who "the poor" are in America, and whether they care. NYT: How poor are the poor?
The American legal philosopher Joel Feinberg attacked Mill by saying that we feel offence like a wound. You only have to think about the hurt from slights that have stayed with you longer than the pain from a broken bone to see the truth in his argument. Societies and individuals feel disgust, revulsion, shock, shame and embarrassment when they hear views that don’t physically harm them, Feinberg said in the 1980s. They can and should replace Mill’s “harm principle” with his “offence principle”—that the law can stop speech that causes serious offense.
Feinberg’s mild authoritarianism buttressed the illiberal version of liberalism that flourishes to this day. It supports the laws against “hate speech” which may not be so hateful it provokes its audience to violence, but is still grossly offensive. It provides the philosophical justification for the incessant Twitter storms and media fits about “gaffes”, “misspeaks”, or to use a modern phrase that reeks of the Victorian drawing-room, “inappropriate language”.
Go into the modern university and you won’t hear much about Mill or Milton or the millions around the world who have had to learn the hard way why freedom of speech matters. Instead, you will be fed philosophers far less rigorous than Feinberg.
The totalitarian impulse is omnipresent, and must be resisted at all times. The "offence principle," however, is nothing but a self-ridiculing bullying tactic which deserves mockery rather that resistance. If you equate offense with a wound, you live on the wrong planet. I am offended by people and things continuously, and that's normal life. But this is not really about emotional wounds - it's a bullying tactic and rarely if ever genuine. Not that that matters anyway.
It's the time of year when people begin to cook the game in their freezers. Readers know that I like to make a gallon or so of Gibier Sauce or Gibier Glace each fall or winter, and freeze it.
There are other tasty sauces too for game (or for chicken, pork, even steak) and they are easy, and fun, to make.
True or false: Modern medicine is a miracle that has transformed all of our lives.
If you said “true,” you’d be right, of course, but that’s a statement that demands an asterisk, a “but.” “We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine,” writes Atul Gawande, a surgeon (at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston) and a writer (at the New Yorker). “We think. . .[it] is to ensure health and survival. But really. . .it is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.” Through interviews with doctors, stories from and about health care providers (such as the woman who pioneered the notion of “assisted living” for the elderly)—and eventually, by way of the story of his own father’s dying, Gawande examines the cracks in the system of health care to the aged (i.e. 97 percent of medical students take no course in geriatrics) and to the seriously ill who might have different needs and expectations than the ones family members predict. (One striking example: the terminally ill former professor who told his daughter that “quality of life” for him meant the ongoing ability to enjoy chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV. If medical treatments might remove those pleasures, well, then, he wasn’t sure he would submit to such treatments.) Doctors don’t listen, Gawande suggests—or, more accurately, they don’t know what to listen for. (Gawande includes examples of his own failings in this area.) Besides, they’ve been trained to want to find cures, attack problems—to win. But victory doesn’t look the same to everyone, he asserts. Yes, “death is the enemy,” he writes. “But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee... someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t.” In his compassionate, learned way, Gawande shows all of us—doctors included—how mortality must be faced, with both heart and mind.
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York is likely the foremost cancer center in the world. However, in US rankings, it is at the bottom of hospital rankings because most of their patients die, as one might expect from a tertiary care cancer center. If you looked at the rankings, you would avoid the place as a death trap.
For another example, cardiac surgeons who are willing to take on the most difficult, or oldest, cases have the worst survival ratings. Of course they do. They are the best at what they do so they take on high-risk cases.
One of my proposals is for kids to learn stuff anyway they can, with degrees issued by degree-offering institutions following oral and written examinations.
You can tell quickly whether a person knows their stuff in an oral exam. You can ramp up your questions to determine the limits of their knowledge and thinking. If some kids need to be spoon-fed their education, so be it. There's been enough of this overly-costly "college experience" nonsense.
You can almost do that today, but you still have to pay. One of the brightest fellows I know got his BS in Physics from a highly-prestigious university in three years without ever going to class, while playing drums in a touring rock band. Picked up the syllabi, and showed up for exams.
The gap dividing psychoanalysts and cognitive-behavioral therapists and researchers is wide and growing.
Different people with different problems and different personalities can benefit from different approaches. Psychoanalytically-informed approaches can be extremely valuable for some people, and useless for others.
Why would any on-campus crime be handled any differently than an off-campus crime? Colleges today find themselves in a funny spot. Are they in loco parentis, or not? Do they enforce morals, or not? Do they have codes of behavior, or not? They certainly seem to have absurd speech codes. In any event, I would take them out of the criminal justice business.
"Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe. . . .
There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?"
A sharp surface browning of any sort of meat (and some vegetables, and roots for sure) brings out the strongest flavors of the thing. That's the Maillard Reaction. That's why hot-sauteed and lightly-browned parsnips, carrots, green beans, asparagus, and onions are so good too.
Cooking is chemistry. The Maillard Reaction is why every amateur cook dreams of a high-powered industrial stovetop with a big gas flame - "Cooking with gas." That way, you can brown things, even fish, while keeping the inside rare. Readers know that's how I cook steak, always on the gas stove (well, sometimes on charcoal for steak, lamb, and Bluefish but it's the same idea.) Chicken is more flavorful browned too regardless of what you use it for after.
To make a great European-style meat stock, you want max flavor. That's why you use the M Reaction to first brown all the bones and meat scraps, and the vegetables too (mushrooms, garlic, carrot, celery, onion, etc), before you throw them into the stewpot with the water, peppercorns, herbs, and wines.
I only use two stovetop heats: Max and Very Low/simmer.
For some recipes you do not want those intense flavors, which is why lots of Asian stew-type recipes use unbrowned meats. Boiled chicken, for example, pork, or shrimp, and lightly boiled vegetables and roots. The Maillard Reaction is thus avoided to permit more subtle flavors. Very pleasant things like like sashimi, carpaccio, steak tartare, etc., take subtle to the max.
Megan talked about browning her beef stew beef in the oven to make it easier. Not a bad idea. Browning chunks of beef or lamb for a stew in a pan is messy, and who will clean the damn pan? And, for a stew, you don't care how well-done the meat is.
We like to let people - mostly possible NYC visitors - know about cool spots. We've covered Arthur Avenue, Jean George's cheap lunch, Keens for mutton chops, The Campbell Apartment, and lots of other fun places.
Here's another to add to your list: Club Macanudo. You can smoke!
The most pleasant clubs in NYC are private, large, old, and gracious (and permit smoking), but you need a friend member to get inside. Still, plenty of nice places for the proletariat.
Connecticut remains the most heavily-taxed state in the US (and the wealthiest, per capita), with supposedly the most government services (or maybe just the most costly) and almost the highest-paid government employees (after California): Connecticut Residents Work 6 Weeks Longer Than Louisianans to Pay Taxes
We often wonder what is gained by contributing all of this money, but in a Blue State you are at their mercy so you just try not to think about it. With all its dying cities filled with government-dependents, its liberal gentry, and the union power, you're screwed.
The higher they raise them, the faster they drive away the people who can pay them. It's a shame, because it's a wonderful little state with plenty of history, recreation, rural beauty, schools and universities, educated people, social life, every kind of church, seaside, rivers, real seasons, etc.
That was our ironic term for my all-boys boarding school. Since then, times have changed and the ruling class ain't what it usta be (and never was), but I'll tell y'all about it here, if you are interested. (No, it's not Groton)
The history of American education is fascinating to me. I'd like to write the book but it seems like too much work and my writing has no zip to it, no flair, wouldn't sell. I wish I could write like Michael Lewis.
Private boarding schools (prep schools) are a relatively recent development (late 1800s) in the northeastern US and California, but had a long history in England. Prior to that, children of the prosperous in the US were mostly home-schooled (tutors) to prepare them for college.
Public education in the US, since the mid-1800s, was based on the Prussian/German model, as are American universities. The older American private secondary schools, however, were modeled on English private ("called "public") schools. But, as always through human history, the brightest and most talented kids were/are self-educated in the end.
My school was as much about the cultural experience as it was about the information and skills acquired - but those were high-level too. In fact, they tried to pack in everything you might need to begin adulthood in a time when college was considered adulthood. Four years of this would make much of college today redundant.
Below the fold, I will tell you about it all and how it worked well even for kids like me without superior IQs.
I recently read that there are only 1 million Americans with net worth of $5-25 million, and only 142,000 Americans with over $25 million in net worth. There are so many millionaires in NYC, you would think it's normal and end up with a distorted view of life.
All inequality statistics could be solved by confiscating all of these wealthy assets. However, it would not even put a dent in American's debt to China. Another problem is that those people would go out and do it again, so best just to take their money and houses and stuff and then kill them, and kill their kids too just to be on the safe side. Kill the kulaks.
Maybe better just to confiscate the wealth of old people who lack the energy to make money again. Hey - there's a policy to campaign on.
A famous Cape-Codder, Lorenzo Dow Baker (scroll down a little for the story):
As the 8th & youngest child of a fisherman and his wife, Lorenzo grew up on a homestead on Bound Brook Island on the bay side of northern Wellfleet. When he was 6, his mother died and his dad married a widow with several children of her own. Needless to say, his was not an easy life. He was apprenticed to a fishing captain at age 10, became a cook on a fishing schooner at age 15 and was considered an outstanding fisherman at the age of 18. By age 20, he was captain of a fishing schooner and eventually owned his own fishing schooner, "Vineyard". He married his childhood sweetheart, Martha, when he was 21 and she was 17. They had 4 children, Lorenzo Jr., Joshua, Martha and Reuben. He was a devout Methodist and a devoted husband and family man. For nine years, he made his living as a sea captain and fisherman...
For Passover, a friend sent along his reminiscences of growing up Jewish:
Will Your Kids Go to College, or to the University of Everywhere?
A famous Cape-Codder,