We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
This is a bit of a gripe piece. I know when I was younger, there were people in the organization I worked who felt I was a cocky and outspoken employee. But I was effective and that allowed mobility, and I developed a good reputation over time. As time has gone on, younger people have moved up and I've noticed a considerable bit of 'ageism' on the part of younger folk, so forgive me if I engage a bit of my own.
Not too long ago, I was teaching a class within my company. I encourage Q&A, as well as comments and interruptions as long as they are on topic. At one point, a young man stopped me to ask, "Wouldn't we be better off if we just got rid of the older executives who don't understand new media, and started fresh from scratch?"
I smiled, and replied very simply, "No."
He took offense and commented that younger people knew more, were more adaptable, etc. I again smiled and said, "I know what you're thinking. I was there once, too. We do tend to think, when we're new to the workforce, that business is messed up and we know a better way. Frankly, we probably do when we're younger. But there are a few things lacking when we think this way. For example, experience and perspective. While I can understand you point of view, and to some degree you're correct, the reality is altogether different and it may take time to understand, let alone accept, this."
He was not happy with my response, and his interruptions eventually disrupted the class and we never finished. I had to speak with his director about his behavior. Eventually, he left the company to go with a smaller start-up firm. I hope he found what he was looking for.
He wrote treatises on chess, math, and other things too. Imagine what sort of website he could have had, had he only invented the intertunnels too. Everybody knows that Sippican invented the intertunnels.
Double entry sounds like tax cheating, but it is not. It is about credits and debits. (It does not refer to the private, personal books for cash receipts that many unscupulous Lefties use to dodge Uncle Sam and rip off their neighbors.)
A little over a month ago, I posted a piece on Seth Klarman's call for a change in economic policy. The bizarre action in stock and bond markets indicate something is amiss. Is 'tapering' going to tank the market (undoubtedly, if done properly)? Will our increasingly likely involvement with Syria have implications in the economy (of course)?
What all these questions imply is that we're spending too much money, somewhere, on 'stuff', rather than productive capacity. Production is what creates consumption and demand, not vice-versa as Keynesians suggest. The very first consumer had to produce (via hunting/gathering) what he/she consumed before it could be consumed. This is not a chicken-egg question, it's self-evident. Your desire to consume a hard-boiled egg may create the demand needed to have someone, somewhere to boil an egg and sell it to you. This desire, however, cannot be stimulated by providing you with cash or the means to purchase or make the egg. Before you can create that demand, you have to know it can be produced either by yourself or by someone else who you can purchase it from. If the recipe for a hard-boiled egg doesn't exist, but you desire it, your entrepreneurial spirits may be stirred to become a cook and make this for all to enjoy. That process leads to the development of consumer desire for the product.
Today, however, our government believes desires of this sort are generated by moving money, with the benefit of a 'central brain' in Washington, D.C. to guide the money into places where it can be used to increase consumption, which will drive production. This guided shifting of cash will lift all boats. Not all the money will be shifted from the rich to the poor, but some will be shifted from the future into the present, making the present more productive, and the future that much more productive because we'll borrow from tax revenues generated by increased taxes on the future rich.
Aaron Clarey prepared a useful chart showing how well this works, how much GDP we get per government dollar spent.
The problem with Keynesianism is its core belief that you can properly shift money to productive areas through a reasonably well guided government process. There are some who claim borrowing from the future limits future productive capacity, due to payments on interest. This is true to a point. One has to remember entrepreneurs borrow from the future to increase productive capacity. That concept is not flawed in business. The reason it is flawed in government is at least two-fold:
1. Dead-weight loss. A government has to pay for bureaucrats to shuffle the money from the taxpayer to the areas of productive value, and is not incentivized to do it in a timely or useful manner. An entrepreneur will do this more efficiently, realizing any wasted money is lost potential. 2. Perfect knowledge. None of us have perfect knowledge regarding what will yield great productivity. More entrepreneurs fail than succeed, but the risk and responsibility falls upon them and their investors. It's only logical that government will fail more frequently than it succeeds if it tries to use money to increase productivity. This is why Solyndras are more common than not. But the problem is the risk is absorbed by taxpayers, not investors, who may not have wanted to see the money go to a Solyndra, while the responsibilty should be borne by the politicians, but is never assigned to them in full. More importantly, government reassignation of revenues is not a tool of progress, as some politicians claim, it is a tool for resistance to change.
Markets are conducive to evolutionary improvement. Government empowers those who want to resist change.~Arnold Kling
The government's failure shouldn't be a surprise. If he was an entrepreneur, the massive failure of Obama's economic policies should almost be expected.
It is the source of the money he is using to pursue his goals that are at issue. All investors may be taxpayers, but not all taxpayers are investors. It is wrong to force them to invest when the odds of failure are high and they have no say about who gets the money.
Taxing Peter to pay Paul is using Peter for Paul. It is corrupting. Modern governments have been encouraged to think that any abuse of Peter is just fine, that Peter is a slave available for any duty that the ruler has in mind. ~Deirdre McCloskey
Some of our friends have a (volunteer, but expert) project to provide cheap and simple medical 911 systems to Third World countries. They plan to begin with Haiti and Latin America.
It's a good cause. Roll them a coin if you can, and tell friends who might be interested. It's not an app, it's a phone feature. God bless those who put their time, brains, and energy into such positive and inventive pursuits.
Few of us in the First World have any idea what it's like out there. And still people in America complain about medical care. They always will. Prosperity and the world's best medical care have turned us into babies.
A couple of years ago, Mrs. BD and I vowed to never replace a rotten piece of wood on the outside of our home - or of the Farm, for that matter - with real wood. Purists like Sipp might object, but we've had enough. Too expensive in the long run.
My father-in-law taught me this lesson, and recently re-did most of his home's exterior these ways. He is no longer thrilled with the DIY approach as he grows a little older.
Blame design, or Nature, or Entropy, or whatever. Dead wood and water do not mix. Not in Yankeeland, anyway.
In the past week, we had Anderson's custom replacement service replace 8 old custom-sized windows with their new fake, never-paint, never-chip, last-forever composite frames and good thermopane glass. Not anywhere as expensive as one might have thought, but still costly enough with all of the custom sizing. Including three casement windows. Their guys work fast, too. Did it all in one day, and put insulation in the edges of the new frames.
Any wood that rots - sills, etc. - all we will use is Azeks. If it rotted out once, it will do so again. We're gradually replacing all the dang wood columns for the pergola and the porches with custom fiberglass columns with 6X6" pressure-treated wood posts hidden inside.
These new "woods" never rot, never peel, never warp, and never need painting. Woodpeckers never peck holes in them, and wood-boring wasps leave it alone. Best thing of all: it looks like real wood.
You might say that we have been converted by maintenance cost.
Finally! One thing we can all agree on is that last-minute Christmas shopping is a real drag. The crowds, the noise, the confusion, the cold sleet or snow because you're in the middle of goddamn winter — in short, it sucks.
So, while we'd all appreciate just a few more days in the shopping season to help us out, the hands of the retailers are tied since there's an unwritten rule that they can't swamp the land with Christmas stuff until the official 'Thanksgiving timeline' is over.
However, with the help of the Department of Interior collaborating with the National American Turkey Council, they came up with a very clever solution:
For someone who grew up in an era when it was strictly verboten for businesses to put up Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving, it's been somewhat sad to see the commercial greed seep forth a little earlier every year since. I believe these days the decorations are going up just after the 4th of July. I hear Easter's the next goal.
In the writing biz, this is known as when fantasy meets reality.
If you live in a flood zone, you should expect floods. If you build in a forest prone to fire, you should expect fire.
Flooding is nature telling you that you should not build a house there. Fire, likewise. Fire is part of a forest's natural cycle. Fire suppression only makes the next one hotter and more violent.
Floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires. Mother Nature is a harsh school-mistress. As the sea-captain said, "I love going to sea, but I do not love the sea. The sea is my enemy because it is always trying to find a way to kill me."
The same goes for the deep woods.
If you recall, the last big fire in Yosemite was a boon to wildlife and to the forest's health. It's like a natural ecosystem, ya' know?
Unfortunately, the advice to eat less saturated fat probably isn't going away anytime soon. Like the baseless ideas that calories are calories, or fat people simply lack willpower, fear of dietary fat has become entrenched in our thinking about nutrition, and won't die no matter how many times it's debunked. But if we're going to be lead to believe that saturated fat is harmful to our brains, the link should be based on more than observational research. I'm certainly not convinced that I need to eat less bacon, anyway.
This is part of why my high-meat, zero carb weight loss program (fixed) works: all calories are not handled the same way (and bacon and eggs are a good, healthy diet breakfast). More here:
There are and always have been populations around the world who are both poor and very physically active who have obesity rates very similar to those of the United States and other Western societies. Under this paradigm, there are certain foods — mainly carbohydrates — that stimulate an insulin response and cause weight gain. Avoiding these foods is probably a good idea for those of us who easily store body fat.
Like I said, if you want to lose weight, cut out the carbs and eat meat. Calory-counting does not work because it's the insulin that stores the carbs.
A daughter and her (seemingly) true love are heading off for ten days in Japan tonight. This daughter been to lots of places in the world, but never Asia. (I have never been further east than Turkey, and have no desire for further.)
She emailed me and asked whether I had any travel advice for Japan. I told her all I know: "Omakase." It means that you want the sushi chef to surprise you with some spontaneous creations with his best stuff. I survived five years of lousy sushi, ended up calling it "bait." Now that I have found a superb relatively local joint, I am back on sushi.
As far as Italy is concerned, the way Mrs. BD and I lose weight in Italy is by sharing meals. One antipasto each for lunch, and one antipasto, one primi, and one secondi for supper to share. Lots of good tastes, lower volume. And lots of walking.
I believe that I was the Psychiatrist who coined the term "psycho-utopianism." It is the delusional notion, analogous to political and social utopia, that if people could just get enough therapy or analysis, things would happen to perfect a life. Well, it is possible sometimes in some ways for a person's life to improve, but it's a tough world and reality is a harsh master.
Political and social utopian delusions hold that, if the world were correctly organized by the right people (our moral and intellectual superiors), something wonderful would happen, human nature would change. Universal contentment or something like that would ensue. Brave New World.
Ideas about religious utopias of sorts are something I can buy into. Not 72 virgins, or becoming sublime starlight (although I suppose we are, in a sense). The Christian Kingdom of God can and does exist, not the child-like version of heaven and not a theocracy of Christians but the dominion of God in one's heart and soul not after death, but today. The Hereafter is another topic.
Life is a struggle. But I have meandered far off track.
Neuro-utopianism is the fantasy that, if the brain matter itself could be fully understood, life could be peaches and cream and everybody would be nice people or never crazy or neurotic or destructive because the very heart and soul could be dissected and repaired. Repaired, based on whose idea?
Perhaps the "bored youth" need more access to government midnight basketball?
And with this sort of cash lying around, if you got really bored you could take a vacation trip to California or Europe. Or maybe spend it on some summer computer programming courses. When I was a bored youth with only the money I had from my paper route, I'd go fishing or read a book or throw together a little baseball in the neighborhood.
However, I never desired any jail cred. I think jail cred, for these youths, is what Eagle Scout was in my neighborhood. It's a multicultural issue to which we are supposed to be sensitive.
It's not enough to accept any government's explanations for censorship or unlawful detention. We have to consider what compels government to do what it does, in general. That is, the pursuit of power.
The promise to "fight terrorism" may provide a fig leaf, but barely that. "Terrorism" is whatever a government chooses it to be, and this definition will be used by those in power to pursue more power.
my view will be informed by these points:
1. Governments lieabout the scope of their surveillance measures against us.
2. Governments say that what they are doing in the war on terrorism needs to be secret, but governments have an established record of lying about their need for secrecy.
3. When governments say that they are using their powers to fight terrorists, government are lying. Government actually use their expanded powers to pursue whatever they want, including copyright infringement and the War of Drugs. Therefore it would not surprise me in the least if a nominally anti-terrorist measure were stretched here to accommodate a leak investigation.
We don't have room for every single old sentimental object, Mrs. BD informs me. Furthermore, she does not want our home to "become a museum" for my family of origin. I agree with that.
So the question at hand is this: To throw out my Dad's rocking horse - or not? There is no place for it. The horse looks like it has had chemotherapy, but really it's just the result of 3 generations clinging to its mane to hold on. The ears, too.
Reminds me of Rosebud, from my Dad's favorite film.
There is no evidence that people on welfare are lazy. Indeed, surveys of them consistently show their desire for a job. But they’re also not stupid. If you pay them more not to work than they can earn by working, many will choose not to work.
While this makes sense for them in the short term, it may actually hurt them over the long term. One of the most important steps toward avoiding or getting out of poverty is a job.Only 2.6 percent of full-time workers are poor, vs. 23.9 percent of adults who don’t work. And, while many anti-poverty activists decry low-wage jobs, even starting at a minimum-wage job can be a springboard out of poverty.
Thus, by providing such generous welfare payments, we may actually not be helping recipients.
Avoiding poverty is easy. Get a job. Work hard. Save money. Make friends. Get married before you have kids.
When investors and entrepreneurs consider important decisions like where to establish a residence, where to operate a business and, yes, where to die, they compare their options. From a financial point of view, Connecticut turns out not to be a great option.
I love this state, or parts of it anyway. However, it is one of those states, like California, which once were independent-minded and traditionalist Yankee Red, but gradually turned Blue and then finally Dark Blue. They took their prosperity for granted. Farms, inventors, entrepreneurs, booming factories, great private schools, and great universities and colleges; the summer homes of the prosperous of NYC and even Hollywood; a charming coastline great for swimming, sailing, and fishing; old-time Yankee towns and virtues.
Jobs for all. Minimal taxation. A huge middle-class, with more upper-middle than most states had, to spread their money around. Huge Hartford insurance industry. Horses, cattle, fine Connecticut shade tobacco. Old town greens with their Congregational churches. Town Meeting governments where every wise old guy and every crank had his say. The southern half is close to NYC, and the northern half goes to Boston for baseball and football and hockey. Good choices.
Government policies did their damage. State taxes and local property taxes. Unions corrupted urban governments, along with some of the immigrant Mafioso components. Semi-skilled blacks from the rural South moved north in a vast migration for the industrial jobs, jobs which fled this high-tax, heavily-unionized post-War state leaving them with nothing while immigrant Mexicans happily do most of the hard labor and even skilled labor like masonry and construction, and are happy to work in our Dunkin Donuts shops.
For many businesses and many individuals, economics now trump sentimental home-town and home-state attachments.
Probably, like many Californians, government is doing their best to drive me away but it's still home to me. Roots, family, friends, traditions, church, clubs, colleagues. Some of my wealthy friends retire to elite enclaves in Florida for six months plus one day, and spend the rest of their time up here. Not that they really retire, but you know what I mean: they keep working via the internet and phone.
Attorneys and accountants are needed to minimize the damage of the government greed which, unlike private desire for profit, comes to us at gunpoint.
Nothing about Florida holds any charm for me (sorry, Florida readers). It's just how I feel. I have enjoyed visits to the Everglades, and other places in Florida. But not to live. It's just not my subculture.
Now I must be off to a neighborhood cocktail party. Some of the old traditions persist amongst the traditionalist old minority here, where a blazer and tie are still never the wrong attire for a Connecticut Yankee.
Nobody has informed Bridgeport about that yet, but I still hold some hope for that old town if they can starve out the mob, the unions, and etc. "Park City."
Zinn hated the country which made him millions with his 1930s-style propaganda, and which bought his nice summer place on Cape Cod. He even bought the theater there. There is something twisted about people who welcome opportunity for themselves, but hate it for others.
The alienation of citizens from their government is not limited to people whom the government decides to prosecute. Because so many regulations are so unconnected to anything resembling right or wrong, people who want to be law-abiding find themselves picking and choosing the laws that they deem worthy of respect. It is a pernicious process regardless of whether they get caught when they break the rules. People who feel compelled to judge laws on a case-by-case basis have attached provisos to one of their most basic civic loyalties.
Photo is of the Obamacare law. Nobody in America knows all of what's in it, to this day. No doctor or lawyer ever will and, God knows, no politician will ever bother to know: they exempted all national politicians from it. Teams of hundreds of junior staffers wrote that stuff, and put in whatever they felt like.
The detailed regulations to that pile of crap will fill a library, and every hospital, drug company, medical device company, insurance company, doctor, and nursing home in America will be in violation of something. Work for attorneys, for sure, so I guess that's a good thing.
Our government is insane. My personal definition of insanity is not knowing that you are nuts. If you worry about being nuts, you probably aren't.
When, why, and where, did around 50% of Americans get the notion that government was a good thing rather than the necessary but strictly-limited evil which our founders envisioned? What made tough, independent American pioneers into willing children of the State? Is European-style serfdom contagious?
My ancestors escaped serfdom, at great personal risk. I will be loyal to that. I have no gratitude for government "services." I want to be left alone and never "helped." That's American to me.
I've always felt that his singing voice - or rather voices, because he has tried a few over time - never was either pretty or beautiful. At this age, he mostly croaks like a frog. Many or most male folk singers and rock singers are the same. What his voice has is character, expression, remarkable phrasing. I've never heard anybody cover a Dylan song more effectively than he sang it - even songbirds like Joan Baez and Emmylou.
The Band got closest, but even then, not quite the real thing.
I don't think "beautiful" is the point. Expressiveness is the point. I can appreciate Sinatra's polish, Pavarotti's mastery, but it's not them. What's your opinion?
Nobody knows what "higher ed" means anymore. In other words, it means nothing in particular. Employers want to know what you can do for them today to improve their profits. That's simple. It's not what higher ed was designed for in the 1300s and 1500s and 1800s, but it seems applicable today. Practicality.
It's a great loss, but people do need to make a living. Higher ed is not just for the elite and the intelligentsia anymore. Things have changed. Estate taxes, for one thing. The Gentleman's C is a thing of the past.
The term "higher" is obsolete. People like Oprah are today's elite.
As of this afternoon, my parents' house is empty of everything. Even the dumpster has departed. The Steinway Baby Grand was happily delivered to our parlor today and sounds pretty good there. My Mom's Victorian cast iron bird bath with four herons is in the driveway, waiting for me to show it some love with a power-wash and some Rustoleum. My Dad's Danish-style double bureau is in my bedroom. I've needed one forever, never saw one I liked. The drawers are cedar, so it smells good. Plus it was my Dad's for many years. He liked Danish design.
Funny thing about my parents. They never owned many clothes, but they always looked perfectly appropriate, and modestly-elegantly-attired, whether for weddings, beach club parties, dinner parties, fancy cruises, country clubs, hiking in Europe, opera, funerals, yard work, etc. I don't know how they did that. Mrs. BD opined that they did it by owning a very few perfect and very fine things, and were careful to never over-dress. They were not shoppers but seemed to have excellent Yankee taste. They had very little clothing for Good Will to take away.
Their dining room table is now against a wall in our living room, for the moment, where the piano mover guys were kind enough to lug away our old upright that my kids learned on. We might want to keep that Danish slate-topped table and use it as our kitchen dining table, as the wonderful one we use is quite large. Huge. Or save it for a kid. Mom's jewels - the few which I obtained thus far - are stashed in my safe.
After I do some clean-up, I'll post some pictures of it all. Life in Yankeeland goes on. An empty family house is eery, and left me feeling troubled and disoriented. I was already away at boarding school when they built it, but it became home even though I never really lived there. Somebody prosperous will love it, paint it, and raise some fine batch of kids there (it has 6 bedrooms). It's a lovely dwelling. Or maybe they will decide to do a demolition and start fresh. We are gone now.
Clean and wax the floors, wash the walls, then an open house asap. It's a short walk to the Congo church on the hill. It's only worth around a million, for the land. The lovely, large, but 1960s-era home itself does not seem to factor in its value at all. Small bathrooms, lots of big windows with no thermopane. People expect more comforts, nowadays, even though it is entirely sufficient and functional, modestly elegant and comfortable.
My parents were not interested in modern conveniences. Instead of a/c, they just planted trees to shade the house. No sound systems. Radio with WQXR.
Dad, I believe, was proud to have designed and built it for his big family of five kids. A place to read and talk, entertain, eat, and sleep. Never a TV until all the kids left, and always dogs until they got too old to take good care of them. Springers.
Call it Psychopathy or Sociopathy or just "bad people," people with an excess of predatorial instincts are all around us. Overwhelmingly most are non-violent, but what Dr X points out is that psychopathy is a matter of degree.
Most people who worry about being bad or evil, are not especially so. Sociopathic people rarely recognize their inner bad, and often think highly of themselves. Significant degrees of sociopathy can be found in people in all walks of life, not just in penitentiaries (in which few penitents are to be found). I knew a brilliant, charismatic Psychologist with abundant psychopathic traits who probably helped more people than I ever will with his charm, warmth, and wisdom. He had enough self-awareness to keep himself out of serious trouble but he had some close calls.
Dr X pointed out this piece at Smithsonian: The Pros to Being a Psychopath - In a new book, Oxford research psychologist Kevin Dutton argues that psychopaths are poised to perform well under pressure. Not sure I agree, but an interesting topic.
A "Cape" is short for a Cape Cod - style house. This was a common architectural style in the Colonial period, especially on Cape Cod but in New England generally. Common also in the Colonial Revival period (1930s-1950s). More about Capes in Wiki.
Accountants know who he was. He was a pal of Leonardo, and 
People always talk about the places they'd like to see or to visit. It's a big world. Most everybody has a bucket list.
Finally! One thing we can all agree on is that last-minute Christmas shopping is a real drag. The crowds, the noise, the confusion, the cold sleet or snow because you're in the middle of goddamn winter — in short, it sucks.
I believe that I was the Psychiatrist who coined the term "psycho-utopianism." It is the delusional notion, analogous to political and social utopia, that if people could just get enough therapy or analysis, things would happen to perfect a life. Well, it is possible sometimes in some ways for a person's life to improve, but it's a tough world and reality is a harsh master.
With good reason. 
