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.
The DSM, like the Psychiatric section of the ICD-9, was developed to provide a common language to people who work in mental health. Actually, for four basic purposes: a common language, as a basis for research, as clinical guidelines, and for filling out insurance forms and disability forms.
In our daily work, many Psychiatrists do not take it too seriously but use it as a rough guideline. Unfortunately, the DSM has been over-medicalized, reified, such that everything in there is sometimes regarded as a real, discrete, "disease." Some are, some are not. In many cases, it doesn't matter, because we approach each patient as an individual human and not as a diagnostic code.
As one of my wise old mentors says, "I've never seen a patient of mine in the DSM."
Our pal Sipp sent us the following missive, as a corrective to this morning's link on the topic:
The recipe for barn red is right here:
-Boiled Linseed oil. (Dullards like the writer don't know there's two kinds of linseed oil. Boiled linseed oil is what's used for paints. It's deadly poison. Regular linseed oil is what Amish type people use for this and that. I had a boss in the painting business way back when that heard of all the health benefits of a tablespoon of raw linseed oil, and used to eat Boiled linseed oil until I explained the difference. Raw linseed oil never dries, properly, so you can't use it for painting a structure) -Red lead powder. This goes back to the Roman Empire. It's really cheap, and a fantastic pigment. Has a tendency to make your children into dullards, though, even moreso than TV does. -Turpentine. Just old-fashioned paint thinner, distilled from pine sap. -Japan Drier. A dash of this metallic salt makes paint films dry much faster. It's poison, too. Counter-intuitively, if you add a lot, the paint never dries.
Old-fashioned barn stain used to be called OVT. Cabot still call some of their stuff OVT, but lord knows what it is. Oil, Varnish, Turpentine.
Sugar of white lead can be substituted for red lead. It's more expensive, so red got used more. People still called primer "red lead" when I was a kid, and it came in red even after the lead was removed from it. You can still find real red lead in use in shipyards, I bet. Muffy and Biff's yacht often had a coat of it on the bottom despite their Sierra Club protestations. Barns shifted from being painted red to being painted white when the idea of a farm became synonymous with "where the milk comes from." It's just a representation of cleanliness. And colonial era barns, as well as almost everything else, were pretty much never painted in any way. If you'd have seen Salem, Mass or some such place before 1800, the whole place, every stick of it, would have been weathered brown.
Went to take a look at the Lewis Chessmen this weekend. Made of walrus tusk, found on the Isle of Lewis but most likely carved in Norway in the 1100s.
It is believed that Chess, invented in India, found its way from Moorish Spain to northern Europe where it was indeed a game for the wealthy. In Europe, the Vizier was changed to a Queen, the Warder to a Castle (rook), and an elephant to a Bishop.
Took a few pics at The Cloisters, then we took a little drive around Inwood and Washington Heights before driving down Broadway (Manhattan's original highway and first an Indian trail) through Washington Heights (in recent years mostly Central American, now very mixed), past Columbia-Presbyterian Med Center, through Harlem, then back uphill to the Columbia campus, down the Upper West Side, and then cut thru the park at 96th St to get to our lunch date on the East Side.
All I can say is that the City looked great, right through Harlem (which seemed to have plenty of Chinese people now). Not a single boarded-up shop. There are several urban hikes on my agenda, and one is from Inwood to Columbia - the 180s to 114 St. Alexander Hamilton's farmhouse was (is) in Inwood.
The Cloisters this weekend:
A few pics of the pleasant Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan below the fold -
My post about Mahi and Captain Beardsley's catch the other day brings me around to fishing the fly. This time, we'll concentrate on salt water although some of the techniques and gear I'll mention can also be used for big fresh water game fish.
However, before I launch into a short treatise, I'd like to spend a paragraph or two on my personal fishing philosophy.
Izzak Walton said Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned. He also said God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling. While certainly true in some ways, neither statement quite explains the whole attraction to the sport.
Fishing, both bait/reel and on the fly can be as complex or as simple as you wish. Basic arithmetic is simple, quantum physics is complex - both are mathematics. A bobber, cane pole with hook and worm are simple - big game reels with three stage gearing, auto-clutch drags and tension monitors on custom carbon fiber rods, ceramic roller guides and high strength butts are complex.
3 lbs. white, eastern or yellow flesh potatoes 1 1/2 lbs. Emmenthaler cheese grated 1 lb or ring of kielbasa - I use Hillshire Farms' pork, beef and turkey kielbasa 1 pint heavy cream Salt and Pepper 9 x 13 or similar size casserole dish
Peel potatoes, cut into 5mm rounds, boil until firm - not soft. drain set aside cut kielbasa into 5mm rounds Spray Pam on baking dish. season bottom with salt and cracked black pepper. layer potatoes, kielbasa, cheese, repeat, final layer should be cheese on top add heavy cream cover with aluminum foil bake 350 about 1 1/2 hours uncover, bake an additional hour or when the cheese has melted all the way through
If the oven is gas it may go quicker the cheese should gratin on top let stand 15 minutes to set cut into square servings
Artworks that mimic soft porn, showcase embalmed animals, mock the Pope, and otherwise offend propriety are filling auctions, museums, and galleries. Is there anything left to be upset about?
Not a bad essay. Which feels more obsolete in our culture today - propriety or "avant-garde"?
I still believe that Thomas Kincaid did more epateing of the bourgeoisie than any of the new "shocking" artists. He truly upset them with his comfortable, un-hip, and highly-profitable corny pictures:
Punch-card looms were invented in 1801 and remain in wide use today, mostly computer-controlled now but it's the original principle and basically the original loom mechanics.
The fact is that the MCAT contained, until 1977, a major component called "General Knowledge." This covered areas like history, geography, art, music, psychology, and literature, and was far too broad-ranging to possibly study for. I don't know why that part was removed.
For chocolate for baking or candy-making, I use World Wide Chocolate's site for their baking chocolate section. That's where many pastry chefs get their chocolate. There's a right chocolate for any culinary need. It's best to avoid products with under 70% cacao.
For the best chocolate candies, La Maison du Chocolat is probably the best source in the US. Their truffles are extraordinary.
(Photos tear at emotions. I purposely do not include any images in this post as emotions are far from enough to convey the individual stories or the brutalities.)
At sundown today begins the annual observance of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day. There are many museums, plaques, books that let today’s visitors get a glimpse of the horrors and the heroes of that time. As one passes through and on, what is often missed is the individual stories, the lost hopes and potentials, the personal exertions, the evils that were so common among men and women of many nationalities. The Nazis could not have killed so many without the work of those in conquered countries, some coerced, some bribed, some for their own salvation, many because of rife anti-Semitism. The Yad Veshem museum and memorials, including to Righteous Gentiles, outside Jerusalem, is a major repository of these individual stories. Visit the website.
The Holocaust needs to be remembered and restudied in every generation just because of its scale, and because of what it says about the thin veneer that separates now from then and now from recurrence. (It is not by coincidence that the week after Yom Hashoah is the celebration of Israel's Independence Day, Yom Ha'atzmaut.)
Below is a piece I wrote in 2006 that includes first-person accounts of what happened in a village near where much of my family perished.
...more ominous is the condition of the family. The most fundamental component of civil society, it has also become the most vulnerable. Civil society is often identified (thanks largely to Tocqueville) with “voluntary associations.” But the traditional family is not, or at least did not used to be, a voluntary association. Indeed, it is important precisely because it is not voluntary, performing the natural, elemental, even biological functions of bearing and rearing children. Today, as a result of divorce, remarriage, cohabitation, single-parent families, and single-sex parenting, the family has become, in a sense, voluntarized. We are sometimes assured that these “alternative lifestyles” are merely variations on the old, serving the same purposes as the “nuclear” or “bourgeois” family. In fact, these families—“broken families,” like “broken windows”—are often literally “dysfunctional,” incapable of performing the natural functions that define the family.
Civil society has been described as an “immune system against cultural disease.” But much of it has been infected by the same virus that produces the disease—a loss of moral integrity and purpose. What is required, then, is not only the revitalization of civil society but its reform and remoralization—the reform of those institutions that parody government agencies, and the remoralization of those that have lost their moral focus.
Last Friday, the editor of a southern California publication asked me whether I wanted to do a piece about the “settlement” between the US Justice Department and University of California San Diego regarding the handling of racial harassment on campus. I told him that I wasn’t privy to the inside details, so didn’t want to analyze the settlement.
What I do know is that it grew out of incidents on campus in 2010 that caused an uproar of indignation, mostly justifiable. A fraternity held a Compton Cookout that relied on disparaging racial stereotypes of Blacks. A noose was found in a library. (As it later was revealed, a minority student admitted to placing the noose, not considering the implications.)UCSD quickly set up an office on Harassment and Discrimination to hear and judge complaints regarding any campus minority. UCSD took constructive action to uphold laws, alleviate fears and confront facts.
Added:Inside Higher Ed reports: "A professor’s use of a class website at the University of California at Los Angeles to promote a boycott of Israel has led to a protest and a subsequent finding by the university that his actions were inappropriate...Academic freedom experts said that professors are not free to use class websites to promote political agendas. “If the link posted is strictly of a political nature, and is unrelated to the course content, then it is not protected by academic freedom,” said Greg Scholtz, AAUP’s director of academic freedom, tenure and governance."
At the University of California’s sister public college system, California State University, however, the opposite is taking place. The illegal use of college webservers to promulgate anti-Israel propaganda, to promote boycotts of Israel, create an harassing atmosphere on campuses toward Jewish students and others supportive of Israel, and senior administrators who have ignored these transgressions and themself broken the law, has not been addressed nor remedied by the Chancellor of the Cal State system, Charles Reed. The outrageous and illegal activities by some faculty and administration members continue.
I won’t belabor you with all the details here. Just read the latest letter: "Abuses of academic freedom at CSU need your attention", below, from leaders of AMCHA, an organization to protect Jewish students from illegal harassment, written to Chancellor Reed, Cal State college presidents, and the state officials elected to protect the rights of all Californians. The issues have previously been brought to their attention, including by me (Cal State’s Chutzpah, in City Journal). The issue is already moving to the courts. We await the US Justice Department to intervene, or to as so often in this administration exhibit a proclivity to only become involved on behalf of one minority.
The real threat that the Ann Romney's of the world represent to the statist Left is yet another of the many insightful posts by a mom in Marin whose blog Bookworm Room is a must add to your daily web surfing. She and I have become friends over the years sharing our parenting experiences, she and I -- a work at home Dad -- considering how to best raise our young children for a positive life and constructive role in society. An excerpt from her post today:
For the last many years, I have been the single most important influence on my children. Yes, they go to school (public school, yet); and yes, they both have thriving social lives; and yes, I’ve been unable to insulate them from a Leftist pop culture that is hostile to traditional norms and to conservatives generally, but I’m still the most important person. Of all the influences in their lives, I am the one who is most present, most consistent, and most trusted. I’m sure they’ll pull away as they get older, and they may even rebel, but I’ll still be that little voice in their brain, imparting facts, values, and analyses.
I am the counterweight to the state. Therefore, I am dangerous. I am subversive simply by existing. My love for my children is a dominant force that works its way into their psyches and that trumps the state-run schools and the state complicit media world. Some mothers, of course, are entirely in sync with schools and media. They happily reinforce the statist message. But those of us who don’t are a powerful anti-statist force and we must be challenged.
The Left’s problem with Ann Romney transcends her husband’s wealth, her (and his) Republican identification, and her decision to work for her children, rather than for a paying employer. The Left’s problem with Ann Romney is that she represents the triumph of the individual. No wonder they hate her so much.
Here's Part 4 of Charles Murray's intervew with Peter Robinson on social capital. When I first heard Murray discuss social capital, I did a Venn diagram of the positive communities (even including the virtual community of Maggie's Farm) of which I am a part. It was illuminating, and I think I can say that I am quite involved in my community and in many sub-communities and thus have a good store of social capital in Murray's use of the concept.
Of course, my religious communities are there, too. Mead discusses here: Religious Are Key to American Revival. I don't particularly enjoy apologetics for religion which include things like "it's good for society," or "it's good for you," but he makes some points.
The campaign by leftist pressure groups for companies to cease their contributions to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) may backfire on those feckless companies that have succumbed. So far, that includes Kraft Foods, Intuit, Wendy’s, Arby’s, McDonalds, Walgreens, Pepsi and Coca Cola.
ALEC has over 2000 members who are state legislators, out of the 7282 State legislators across the US, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. ALEC members cooperate on developing model legislation for their states that is pro-growth, pro-jobs, lower taxes. ALEC, also, exchanges model legislation among its members based on the work of a particular state. This has included legislation for Voter ID and for Stand Your Ground self-defense, two bete noires of the left.
ALEC has over 300 companies who contribute up to $25,000 each for the opportunity to engage in conversation with state legislators about issues that affect their business. The few who have turned tail may well find themselves with a weakened hand as state legislatures consider issues. Well, if they don’t support free enterprise, they will be less free.
ALEC issued a “statement today in response to the coordinated and well-funded intimidation campaign against corporate members of the organization…We are not and will not be defined by ideological special interests who would like to eliminate discourse that leads to economic vitality, jobs and fiscal stability for the states.”
The intimidation campaign is made up of the usual Soros and similar organizations on the activist left, as Michelle Malkin outlines. She recommends boycotting their products. Consumer boycotts of companies with such wide distribution seldom amount to much. What will really hit these companies is the legislation that affects them. Go left, Go to someone else, like the leftist groups you respond to that want to raise your taxes and reduce your freedoms to operate profitably, over 25% of state legislators may well say.
It's been a giant cultural change in medicine. Half of medical students are women these days. Many of them are Asians.
Today, college men are beginning to consider it to be a chick profession. Including cardio-thoracic surgery. Heck, I even know a lady urologist in Boston. Why not?
Many of the young women I know are going into Emergency Medicine. If you walk into your local ER, you will see if full of cute young ER MDs. Women going into medicine today tend towards the areas where they can work definite hours for a paycheck, work part-time, and have no on-call duties. ER, Radiology, Dermatology. They want a regular paycheck, benefits, and regular hours, and do not want the burdens, stress, and risks of opening a private practice. And, as as a gender, I think we tend to be more comfortable with rules and protocols than men and thus make better employees. Male docs hate rules and enjoy defying them.
The culture of medicine is changing, for better or worse. The older male docs will say, in confidence, that medicine is becoming "pussified." Their old school view is that medical practice is not meant to be either convenient, comfortable, or a partial dedication, but rather more like a priesthood.
Worse case, I can see a future of salaried docs happy to be working in government clinics. You patients will not like that.
Vermont and Maine are the least urbanized states in the US, and close to the bottom of average GDP per hour worked.
Our friends at Vermont Tiger see these data as a problem, but I don't see what the problem is. These states are in control of their development, their industrialization, their welfare payments, etc. Apparently they do not seek growth or development. What's wrong with that? It's their choice, and apparently most people who live in those states like it that way. Money isn't everything: some seek it, some just want enough to survive until the Social Security gravy train kicks in, paid for by the labor of the folks in the wealthier states. Rural and rustic, with the good and bad (see the Rumford (Maine) Meteor) that come with that.
If those folks want more jobs and urban life, there is a simple solution: bathe, shave, get a haircut, and pile your stuff in a U-Haul and move to the resurgent Bronx in a few short hours. Job choice, no big snow problems, walk to the Stadium, lots of bars and bodegas, quick express subway to the Metropolitan Museum. How bad is that?
I like the idea of each state following its own heart. Each one is crazy and/or corrupt in its own way.
That's a question I have discussed often here, along with the history of higher ed. Yes, we all understand that college has become a job credential, a social credential, and a professional prerequisite. Why that is has never been clear.
The common assumption among policymakers is that, in order to maintain its higher living standards against emerging markets competition, the United States must invest more in higher education. To achieve this, the government has instituted a massive student loan guarantee program, with over $1 trillion outstanding and an average of $25,000 in debt for every graduating student with debt. Yet millions of students continue to graduate with degrees that have no obvious real-world benefits. There’s a disconnect here, and it is beginning to appear that the current U.S. obsession with higher education is misguided.
The traditional idea of higher education was to train the literate for the Church, whether Catholic, Episcopalian or other Protestant. However a hundred years ago, for the elite on both sides of the Atlantic, a very different approach had been devised. This was best illustrated in Evelyn Waugh’s immortal “Brideshead Revisited” in which the protagonist Lord Sebastian Flyte wanders round Oxford with a teddy bear, drinking champagne, eating quail’s eggs and occasionally throwing up onto other students’ carpets. Americans will scoff at this depiction, but really the Harvard of Theodore Roosevelt was not very different, except in that it involved the occasional life-threatening game of football.
Flyte’s Oxford was not intended to train him for real life, it was intended as a highly enjoyable 3- or 4- year holiday before real life intruded. For the middle classes whose fathers were not Marquesses – a majority at Oxford even in Flyte’s time; there are only 34 Marquesses – the system applied a gloss of social polish and connections that was useful in later life, but did not impart more than a modicum of knowledge. Certainly the education provided was not expected to involve a huge amount of work, or to be useful in a subsequent career.
I grew up in my working class neighborhood with friends of different races, ethnic backgrounds, religions, and sexual orientations. Although there were stereotypes and jokes that, in retrospect, are embarrassing, we all talked openly and understood each other. That bred mutual respect and defense of each’s rights to fair treatment based on merit, whether socially, in school, jobs or sports. We carried that into our adult lives and actions.
Inside Higher Ed, respectfully liberal, published the results of a study of college students’ attitude toward the question, "How important to you personally is helping to promote racial understanding?" To the researchers’ surprise, it became less important as the students went from freshmen to seniors, and that finding held across races. The conclusion as to Backwards on Racial Understanding:
"These findings cast doubt on research and conventional wisdom that argues for the liberalizing effects of higher education on racial attitudes. Instead, it suggests that, for some students, negative experiences with diversity may dampen the relatively progressive racial views they hold when entering college," write the authors in their conclusion.
Look at the right side of the linked page for some job listings for “diversity” positions at colleges. Multiply. Such positions are the fastest growing category of jobs at campuses.
Preaching “multiculturalism” but not practicing it due to allowing and encouraging narrow campus “victimology” groups’ vituperance aimed at other groups and their shouting down or criminalizing contrary ideas may stifle but, at the same time creates resentment and dislike. The actual experience for many students is the noted reduction in commitment to promoting racial understanding.
The study does indicate that having friends of different races and ideas does increase mutual understanding and engagement in promoting racial understanding. That is often referred to as civil discussion. That is increasingly difficult to accomplish on campuses where division and extremist challenges are common and defended by “diversity” ideology that promotes division and protects extremism.
College is the beginning for most students of competition to rise in society. If the rules absorbed are that one must be defensive, instead of mutually supportive, then no wonder commitment to promoting racial understanding declines. As merit of behavior and argument is given second place behind relativistic notions, justice is reduced and society’s future leaders become hypocrites mouthing multicultural platitudes but practicing defensive seperateness.
Physicians, like clergy, are more comfortable with terminal illness and death than others. Routine proximity to death and dying makes it feel natural and normal instead of a great enemy. From the WSJ'sWhy Doctors Die Differently - Careers in medicine have taught them the limits of treatment and the need to plan for the end:
Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. It was diagnosed as pancreatic cancer by one of the best surgeons in the country, who had developed a procedure that could triple a patient's five-year-survival odds—from 5% to 15%—albeit with a poor quality of life.
What's unusual about doctors is not how much treatment they get compared with most Americans, but how little. Charlie, 68 years old, was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice and never set foot in a hospital again.
It's a rare doc who elects heroic and torturous treatments for his own terminal ailment.
Of course expensive and extensive testing is ordered, these days, partly because of malpractice. Any doc will say so. It's about CYA.
As a consequence, young docs are being trained to rely more on the tests they can order than on old-fashioned inexpensive clinical, hands-on evaluation and diagnosis. Thus a vicious cycle begins. And it's all free, because "insurance pays for it." So you get the patient's family in on it too: "Doc, we want you to do every possible thing and do every possible test to check out Granny." Is that an argument a physician wants to have?
No doctor enjoys being on the witness stand answering the question "So, Dr., you elected not to order a CAT scan for Mrs. Jones' headache because you trusted your clinical judgement, and felt the expense-benefit ratio was wrong?"
Our pal 
Went to take a look at 
I tried them. Chef friend sent me the recipe:
Levon Helm, key member of The Band, 
It's been a giant cultural change in medicine. Half of medical students are women these days. Many of them are Asians.