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.
I suppose I was raised on some foods you might term "Hotdish" - Shepherd's Pie, Tuna Noodle, Macaroni and Cheese, Lasagna, Seafood Casseroles, and the like - but it's not a New England term.
As his main course offering for our game dinner, my hunting pal brought his Oryx Moussaka over in his 18 qt. Nesco roaster oven. Just carried it into the kitchen and plugged it in to keep it hot.
(Being a Louisiana-born-and bred guy, he also made 4 Pecan Pies from his Mom's recipe. Made the crusts, too)
His Moussaka came out great, even though he had never made it before. (At our guy dinners, the men cook, the womenfolk are guests, and a helper cleans up. Mrs. BD does the flowers, of course.)
If your oven is full, these seem to function as a spare oven, large enough for a 16# turkey, and their portability, their ability to keep food warm, and the inability to burn food in them, are useful features.
Can they give you an oven-like crusty or gratin surface if that's what you want? No. To brown the top of something, you have to put the enameled insert under the broiler for a few minutes.
It turns out that I am afflicted not just with pharmacological Calvinism but with mindfulness skepticism as well. For while I believe, in theory, that learning to coolly regard my anxiety as a purple, hairy monster I could stash in my tote bag, as Mennin suggests, might steady my pulse on sleepless nights, I am suspicious of any cure that requires more effort and expense on my part and more hours away from my work and my family. In this skepticism, I am like my anxious peers. “We go through rough patches, and we do things that make us feel better,” says Lisa Colpe, an epidemiologist at the NIMH, with the vocal equivalent of a shrug. A lot of people with anxiety would simply prefer to live with it; they know that when it becomes unbearable, the drugs will be there.
A cure isn’t what the PR executive with the occasional Klonopin habit wants. “My own personal experience is that there’s a healthy level of anxiety, and I don’t believe ‘healthy’ is the absence of anxiety,” she says. “I live in a world that puts unreasonable demands on me, and sometimes I need help. I wish I could do it without the pills, but I can’t.”
Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the sombre shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring.
I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, in this fashion: "This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark?"
No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a "break" that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?
The inner-ring suburbs around a major city collectively have a much greater area than the city itself. Hence, even modest reductions in density regulations in these areas--replacing large lots with small ones, single-family homes with townhouses--would have a larger effect on the housing supply than allowing a few more 50-story apartment towers downtown.
Matt points out that housing deregulation would have a number of benefits. High-density living is better for the environment. It promotes a more diverse and efficient service sector. It makes reliable and convenient mass transit feasible. But I think the most important message of Matt's book, and others like Ryan Avent's The Gated City, is that it makes clear that astronomical rents are a result of specific regulatory decisions, not an inevitable malady of urban life.
The Old Meeting House, Hadley, Massachusetts. Yankee readers know that Meeting Houses, in colonial times, served as Congregational worship centers, as the site for the Town Meetings which made local governmental decisions by direct citizen vote, and generally as all-purpose town centers.
(People with kids in the grammar school contributed in cash or in kind - eg firewood, bags of potatoes, jugs of hard cider to keep teacher happy, putting up the teacher in your attic for a few months, etc).
At the time, the puritan Congregational Church was the established sect in much of New England, supported by local taxes. Their spartan, barn-like buildings for worship did not start to look "churchy" until the 1800s (like the newer replacement of the old-fashioned one, on the right of my photo). The Congos were phobic about anything fancy or ostentatious, or anything reminiscent of the Anglican Church or - God forbid! - Roman Catholicism which was commonly viewed as a near-diabolical cult in New England if not a manifestation of the Anti-Christ itself.
Mark Levin made a good point on the radio recently. While pointing out that government takes 25% of all income in the US - and still cannot come close to paying their bills, he said what I felt was important: We're all at fault.
Well, maybe not individually, but all at fault as a voting mass because, since FDR, we have been demanding and taking more and more goodies from the government - ie from eachother. The candy bowl was emptied, so we started borrowing candy from China.
China is making money from those loans, from our labor. But as our commenter Bob said here this morning:
The reality is that a majority of Americans want socialism. They want Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, unemployment benefits, minimum wages and maximum hours, and regulations on the environment, work, housing, food and drugs, zoning, etc etc etc. All that is modern, parliamentary socialism. The old socialism of worker dictatorship and state ownership of the means of production died in WWI when the workers supported the war instead of revolting.
But Americans have been conditioned to hate the word socialism.
Also, Americans, like people everywhere, don't want to pay for it. They keep trying pass the costs on to someone else. There is no one else. The American middle class and working class will have to pay a lot more in taxes to get what they want. A very lot more. Probably at least double.
If taxes aren't raised dramatically, benefits will have to be cut. That will not happen until economic collapse occurs. Greece is everyone's future. Most of the welfare state benefits go to the elderly. If you cut benefits, you will reduce your own grandparents to poverty and you will deny them medical care. In other words, welcome to 1910.
Many of us have read dozens, hundreds, of books about Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, World War II, the Holocaust. Until now, however, a careful work of sound scholarship has not appeared that pulls it all together as does Bloodlands. I could write thousands of words reviewing the book, but nothing could do justice to reading it yourself. Indeed, if you or someone you know reads nothing else on this era, this is the one book that must be read. Bloodlands, by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, details the – by Snyder’s admission an undercount – 14 million individuals murdered in purposeful killing policies by Stalin and Hitler in the central zone of Eastern Europe, Poland, Belorussia, Ukraine, non-Jews and Jews, between 1930-1945. That doesn't include, and dwarfs, the millions of soldiers who died in combat or the civilians in the path of battles.
In his concluding chapter, “Humanity”, Snyder tells us, “Each record of death suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life. We must be able not only to reckon the number of deaths but to reckon with each victim as an individual.”
Snyder points out: “To dismiss the Nazis or the Soviets as beyond human concern or historical understanding is to fall into their moral trap.” Stalin and Hitler had conscious policies to extract material gain from the people who they thought stood in their way. It was boths’ commonality that had each act so barbarously: “Both the Soviet and Nazi political economies relied upon collectives that controlled social groups and extracted their resources.” Many perpetrators of the horrors, also, had material objectives or just were trying to survive themselves. Snyder says that the millions of deaths tells us as much about the living. “It is not at all obvious that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral.” Snyder’s recounting of the murders focuses upon the – to them – practical objectives of Hitler and Stalin: “In colonization, ideology interacts with economics; in administration, it interacts with opportunism and fear.”
The personal vignettes that fill the book, along with the details of the scale of murders, have set every reader back on their heels. No one, no country, is spared the telling of their heroes or devils. Go to Google to see how the learned react to the book. Go to your own soul to see how you react.
In youth, one needs and wants stuff: a roof over one's head, maybe a spouse, transportation, some domestic machines and comforts, recreational toys (guns, tennis raquets, boats, speakers, etc), appropriate clothing, and decent schools for your kids.
In midlife, one begins to hunger for an accumulation of life experiences - or at least I do. I haven't wanted any stuff for years except maybe good cigars, good food at good restaurants, interesting beers, books, and Teaching Company CDs. I buy nothing else anymore - not even an iPad. Well, I did need to replace a couple of computers recently, and it did not go very well. I guess I'd buy more art if I had money to burn, because I look to look at pictures.
My skis are 12 years old, as are my ski boots.
I do not say this from some sort of moral or anti-materialistic standpoint; it's just something I noticed. People tease me about having inexpensive cars and obsolete cameras, but that isn't on my life agenda right now. My father-in-law has always advised "Do it now. Later, you won't be able to enjoy it."
To read things, learn things, go places, see things, do things. That's what I want. What I want is my good work, one cultural outing per weekend day (just one per day, mind you, Mrs. BD), time with my spouse, friends and kids, good energetic manual labor at home and at the farm, interesting and adventurous travel, and a tangible relationship with God.
I sort-of gave up on pursuing the rational goal of financial security long ago: it's a fool's errand, one keeps raising the bar - it can be life-destroying. Furthermore, whenever you think things are going swell, a surprise happens to mess it up. Everybody worries about money, even Warren Buffet. Worry is part of life but it should not be allowed to get in the way of living. Otherwise, what's the point?
Do you feel the same way? Or am I suffering from "Midlife Disorder"? (If so, I sure hope this is only midlife, and that there is a pill or an app for that.)
This morning I read the many comments on the post below about PTSD. In 2006, I wrote the following piece for Military.com. It contains the "science" about PTSD that is often overlooked by those who treat PTSD as a football, often to deflate us. I think adding this post may help to place PTSD in some better perspective.
Rethinking PTSD
Bruce Kesler | August 21, 2006
A recent New York Times article about a new study on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) remarks that the study is “viewed by experts as authoritative.” This knocks the air out of the Vietnam veteran punching bag that stress disorders among our combatants in the Vietnam War were especially severe, long-lasting, and extraordinary. This canard is currently used to similarly undermine the U.S. war effort in Iraq -- a war often without clear-cut fronts and enemy.
Other qualified analysts have come to this conclusion before. The co-authors of One Nation Under Therapy said in a Washington Post column that the criteria used in earlier studies "has a low threshold for calling a collection of symptoms a 'mental disorder.' " Another critique by an expert on PTSD points out the "official publication of the American Psychological Association, American Psychologist, has now reached a startling conclusion concerning all who undergo severe trauma: An astounding 85 percent of people actually show surprising and significant resilience..."
Another Washington Post headline, “Some Veterans Feel Lives Enlarged by Wartime Suffering,” points to another PTSD expert's observation that “the whole field, in the last four years, has shifted to a certain extent to focus on resilience, on human potential. [Studies of World War II veterans showed] ‘Yes, I've suffered…but I wouldn't have given up this experience for anything in the world….The things I experienced have made me a better man today.'”
Other studies have found similar rates of PTSD in combat troops as compared to civilians experiencing severe stress in their lives, as well as among civilians experiencing terrorism attacks or among firemen.
An August 17 New York Times headline says a “Study Finds Fewer Cases of Post-Traumatic Stress in Vietnam Veterans.” The study, which contains important details not covered the NYT's article, appears in the August 18 journal Science, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Contrary to the widely reported figure that a third of Vietnam veterans have developed PTSD, this more careful study reports an occurrence -- still serious -- of 18.7% having temporary symptoms and 9.1% having lasting symptoms 10+ years after the end of the war. At the same time, the study points out “the majority of the veterans with high and very high MHM (military historical measure: “probable severity of exposure to war-zone stressors) did not develop war related PTSD.”
According to the New York Times article: “I'd like to think that this study would help settle the debate, and that both sides would see that this was good science,” said the report's lead author, Dr. Bruce Dohrenwend, a psychiatric researcher at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
“It's true we found a significant reduction in the lifetime prevalence of these disorders,” he said, “but on the other hand we also found that more than 9 percent had current pathology, which is a substantial number of people.”
Richard McNally, a psychologist at Harvard who is skeptical of the earlier estimate, agreed, saying that the new study confirmed his and others' suspicions. “It knocks the 30 percent number out of the box,” he said.
But, he added, the findings “should not be used as a justification for short-changing services that are needed to help veterans” of Iraq or Vietnam.
The new report is a reanalysis of a landmark 1988 study in which researchers tracked down 1,200 Vietnam veterans around the country and interviewed them.
The reanalysis of the data, plus additional investigations, are the result. Another finding in the study is a very low rate of compensation-seeking exaggeration.
Another notable result in the study itself is that:
"The trajectory for most veterans with war-related PTSD that causes substantial impairment is toward amelioration or complete remission. This tendency toward improvement is present even for (approximately) 10% of veterans who still had impairing current PTSD at follow-up; the impairment most of them showed by this time (10+ years after the end of the Vietnam war) was not severe. The functioning of the veterans who had developed war-related PTSD but who no longer met criteria for the disorder at follow-up differed little from that of veterans who did not develop war-related PTSD."
The most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) defines PTSD as the presence of three symptom clusters — reexperiencing via nightmares or flashbacks; numbing or withdrawal; and hyperarousal, evident in irritability, insomnia, aggression, or poor concentration — that arise in response to a life-threatening event.
Both halves of this definition are suspect. To start with, the link to a traumatic event, which makes PTSD almost unique among complex psychiatric diagnoses in being defined by an external cause, also makes it uniquely problematic, for the tie is really to the memory of an event. When PTSD was first added to the DSM-III in 1980, traumatic memories were considered reasonably faithful recordings of actual events. But as research since then has repeatedly shown, memory is spectacularly unreliable and extraordinarily malleable. We routinely add or subtract people, details, settings, and actions to our memories. We conflate, invent, and edit.
I am skeptical about the existence of the diagnosis as a disease entity, because it sounds like a normal, or at least unremarkable, reaction to me. Intense reactions to intense things in life is not pathological. It's how life shapes us, twists us, and eventually wears us down and ultimately kills us. Who said "Reality is for people who can't handle drugs"?
Show me one adult who does not harbor some deep pain which affects his life in mostly negative ways. I'd like to meet them. There's a CS Lewis quote which I cannot remember but which goes something like "Be kind, because everyone you meet is enduring some deep struggle and pain." It's not called "a vale of tears" for nothing. People - and kids - are commonly permanently wounded by divorce, for example. Some joy and delight in life too, thank God.
However, I do understand that nowadays people want their struggle called a disease so they can get insurance and/or disability checks.
A gorgeous couple of days in New York City give me the opportunity to wander around and see how people are enjoying themselves. Central Park is a great place to take it all in. I started on the southwestern portion of the park, at its Columbus Circle entrance. Plenty of people just resting, looking at the flowers blooming in the Circle, or eating lunch.
There are more-or-less three sorts of non-major-mental-illness-related anxieties.
One is anxiety about worrisome real situations, one is anxiety related to real guilt, one is neurotic anxiety. Some would place the anxieties of minor emotional problems, eg phobias, OCD, GAD, etc., among the neurotic category, and some would place them in another (non-major) Mental Disorder category.
Thus anxiety (fearfulness) is mainly a symptom of something, and usually not a "disease" in and of itself. Frequently, we find that what people think they are anxious about is not what they think it is.
Regardless of category, we indeed do have pills to put a band-aid on all of these sorts of anxieties.
In his “Works of Love,” Kierkegaard remarks that all talk about the spirit has to be metaphorical. Sometimes anxiety is cast as a teacher, and at others, a form of surgery. The prescription in “The Concept of Anxiety” and other texts is that if we can, as the Buddhists say, “stay with the feeling” of anxiety, it will spirit away our finite concerns and educate us as to who we really are, “Then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them.” According to Kierkegaard’s analysis, anxiety like nothing else brings home the lesson that I cannot look to others, to the crowd, when I want to measure my progress in becoming a full human being.
But this, of course, is not the counsel you are likely to hear these days at the mental health clinic.
Curing the uneasy soul is not so easy. When it's coming from real guilt, it's not even desirable to cure it. The guilty must suffer to learn, just like school. Good shrinks are not about feel-good, we are about dealing with reality. Reality often does not feel good.
Revolutionary, indeed. As I have written earlier in this space, the ground has moved beneath the feet of higher education, much of which will look very different in but a few short years.
It will be fascinating to see what good competition will do to the higher-ed government-industrial complex. In time, I think it will blow it wide open for better or worse. Not just in STEM, but in everything.
The main brief says: “The individual mandate rests on a claim of federal power that is both unprecedented and unbounded: the power to compel individuals to engage in commerce in order more effectively to regulate commerce. This asserted power does not exist.” If regulating inactivity were a “necessary and proper” means of regulating commerce, they argue, we would expect to see more of it, but in 220 years, Congress has never required individuals to purchase particular goods or services as a condition of being alive. The government, of course, denies that it is trying to regulate inactivity; rather, they repeat the argument they sold to several lower courts, that the mandate regulates “economic decisions.”
The states also argue against the mandate on the basis of federalism...
The American population, as a whole, is a bit adolescent, isn't it? Welcomes freebies, but doesn't want to be controlled. "Dad, can I borrow your car tonight?" "OK honey, just be back by 11:30." "Dad, stop trying to control me."
That darn commerce clause has already been abused to death. It's time somebody finally closed the door.
Will the left side of the Supremes decide that the Feds are all-powerful over every aspect of our lives, including the most personal? The voters are overwhelmingly opposed to such power.
Were zoning abolished, rent control repealed, and developers given free rein in New York, could growth rates remotely comparable to sunbelt cities possibly be matched? Not likely. Even equaling Houston's growth rate – a city with abundant vacant land in and around its downtown – would probably be a challenge. Affordability is an even more distant goal using supply-based strategies alone. Relaxing development restrictions that worsen affordability and hinder supply is a crucial goal, but not one which is likely to lead to rapid population increases, or housing cost relief, in built-out and geographically-constrained cities.
How many of us were good Liberals in youth, only to have our naive illusions shattered by the way the big world really works? For example, we have all learned to see through government's ginning up crises, with the collusion of media, which "only federal government can solve." We have also learned that these are power grabs, and that our federal government is no font of wisdom. It's just a font of unprincipled political calculation.
Readers know that, in Southern tradition, "birds" means Bob White quail. I am not talking about four-and-twenty blackbirds.
Even if you don't have any around, you can get semi-boned (Hey, Bird Dog -have you ever boned a quail?) quail through D'Artagnan. Semi-boned means they leave the bones in the legs and thighs. Great first course.
One of the best first course recipes in the world: Boned Quail Stuffed with Foie Gras. Instead of pate de foie gras, you can use seared chunks of foie gras.
You can do a similar recipe with pheasant, adding some bread crumbs, onion, and apple chunks to the stuffing along with the chunks of seared foie gras. A semi-boned pheasant is good, too.
Your dinner guests will return for dining like this, even if they don't like you.
Or are you totally retarded, and still need elected dingbats to tell you how to live? Efforts to intrude into our lives and choices are becoming absurd. Nannie Bloomberg is one of the worst.
Now he's worried that food donated to the homeless might have too much salt. Kosher food, no less. This guy has some weird obsession with what other people eat. It's not a normal concern, especially for a male. Does he think he's my mother?
The guarantee-issue provision of ObamaCare is expected to result in many enrolling in individual plans who are ill, or waiting to enroll until ill. The Center for Consumer Information & Insurance Oversight (CCIIO) of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will require group health plans to subsidize individual health plans with about $27-billion between 2014-2016. That is expected to keep individual premiums about 10-15% lower but raise group premiums by 1%.
The estimate is supposedly based upon the experience of New York's guarantee-issue requirement since 1993, where premiums have actually skyrocketed compared to the rest of the US. According to Kaiser Health Facts, in 2010 the average individual premium in New York was $357 versus the US average of $215, while the employer-provided family coverage premium is 6% higher in New York. It'll take much more than $27-billion taken from employers to subsidize the added individuals covered by insurance under ObamaCare.
It can be said, with some justice, that libertarians apply only one measure to every issue. But what a sublime yardstick it is. Libertarians ask, about each thing they encounter in public life, “Does this promote the liberty, responsibility, and dignity of the individual?” Libertarianism can have political implications, but politics is, by definition, mass action. And libertarians don’t believe in the masses. They believe in the individuals huddled in those masses. A pure libertarian is opposed to politics down to the soles of his shoes (or, libertarians being libertarians, down to the bottom of his sandals worn with socks). Libertarianism is contra-political, an emetic dose to be given to politics.
This is the real problem we face in America. Jeff G. calls it “un-American”. In the strictest sense of the word and given the fact that it rejects everything our founders believed in – I agree.
Sorry - I put "sexy" in there to grab your attention and to make a point about words. If you studied cognitive psychology or good old-fashioned linguistics in college, you learned this famous theory about how language determines thought. If you didn't, it's your loss. Their theory is partly wrong, because humans can think without using words, but it is also partly right, because words do effect and shape our thoughts.
But Sapir-Whorf went beyond that. They theorized that language shapes and structures our perceptions of the world - both our output and our input.
Indeed, words and their concepts seem to do that. Goethe said "Man sees what he knows." A birder sees a Parula Warbler, a non-birder sees just a "bird," or doesn't even notice it at all. The universal metaphor of blindness for ignorance is no accident.
Sapir-Whorf is almost an "In the beginning was the word" theory. However right or wrong their theory was, it has been a useful and productive and intriguing one, which is the only true measure of a theory in science.
I refer to Sapir-Whorf because we had two posts a while ago which were, ultimately, about words and how they are used. One about "values," one about "progress." In both cases, these words and their connotations slipped into regular usage and began shaping our thoughts, sometimes without our awareness. After all, "thinking" happens somewhere in the shadowy darkness between awareness and un-awareness.
Cognitive Daily reviews the history of the hypothesis, and recent research on this dusty but still fascinating topic.
Today’s lead editorial in the San Diego Union-Tribune,“Saving lives is the moral high ground”, validates the post I wrote February 24, "Pig Politics Vs Marine Lives". San Diego area congressman Bob Filner, one of the most liberal in Congress, along with PETA, seek to halt the training of Corpsmen using anesthetized pigs, claiming falsely that using simulators is better. The editorial may be traced not only to my piece but also to the correspondence I had with the reporter who admitted his articles in the newspaper were poorly researched. Kudos to the reporter for taking responsibility. The newspaper’s editor is an excellent, moderate and professional journalist. The editorial is evidence that there are such and they are to be prized and congratulated for upholding journalistic standards.
The newspaper editorial follows:
Saving lives is the moral high ground
by U-T San Diego Editorial Staff
There has long been a soft spot in the Editorial Board heart for animals great and small. We love the seals at Children’s Pool in La Jolla. We supported Proposition 2 in 2008 to ban the inhumane cages and crates used by many California farms to house hens, veal calves and pregnant pigs. We support efforts to protect California gray whales and to save the giant California condor from extinction.
But our soft spot hardens a bit when it comes to the controversy over the use of live pigs in the training of American military corpsmen to help save the lives of the men and women who tragically find their bodies shredded by roadside bombs or other armaments of war on far-off battlefields.
Rep. Bob Filner, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Veterans Affairs Committee and a candidate for mayor of San Diego, has introduced misguided legislation to phase out the use of live animals in combat simulations by 2016 at training grounds such as the privately operated facility at Covert Canyon near Alpine in East County. Supported by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Filner argues that there are alternatives that simulate human body injuries just as well and that the use of live pigs is unwarranted.
But military officials argue that there is no substitute as realistic as live animals in helping corpsmen learn how to keep severely wounded soldiers alive in the stressful conditions of the battlefield. And they emphasize that the pigs are anesthetized throughout the training and monitored by veterinarians.
We hope a 2009 Defense Department report proves true that in years to come there will be high-quality and cost-effective alternatives to the use of live animals for this training. But, today, the lives of U.S. military personnel in combat are being saved in unprecedented numbers thanks to medical training at places like Covert Canyon. And that gives it the moral and ethical high ground.
One of my rare Yankeeland slice of life posts, for our overseas readers who are interested in what we do here in America when we lazy people aren't "working" -
Fertilize lawns Re-load the big bird-feeders Fertilize flowering shrubs and perennial borders with 10-10-10 Re-seed bare spots in lawn and water the seed Put Preen on borders Mulch and edge front garden Pansies in pots Final late-winter prunings (I have mastered the pruning arts, over the years) Remove large redundant branch from the big Peach tree Get organized for our big wild game dinner here next weekend - order delivery of spare tables and chairs, plates and silverware for 30, and warming plates, etc. Clean self up, if possible, for fancy dinner out with group of new friends tonight
In a Friday night news dump, the Obama administration’s proposed solution to paying for free contraception provided to health plan members got ratcheted up to a new level of feeble three-card monte, only not transparent to utter fools, which the Obama administration relies upon.
The Obama administration already mandated that religious employers with insured plans can opt out, but their insurers will have to pay for the contraception. The transparent ruse there is that such costs will actually be passed back to employers in higher premiums, aside from violating their religious doctrine.
The Washington Post reports, Friday night the Obama administration mandated that colleges with self-insured plans, covering about 200,000 students, those in which the college directly self-funds claims via an administrator it pays to process them, will have the tab picked up by the administrator. Several schemes are proposed to accomplish this. Ultimately the cost reverbs back to the sponsor of the self-funded plan. (800,000 more students are covered in insured plans, already mandated by ObamaCare -- or should I call it FlukeCare -- to include contraceptives.)
Over a third of covered workers, over 50-million, receive their medical coverage through their employers’ self-funded plan. Employers have lately been flocking to self-insured plans, to avoid aspects of the ObamaCare onslaught. The Obama administration just brought the siege tower to breach the plans sheltering tens of millions, with more ObamaCare salvos to follow through to devastate another sector of free enterprise health care and freedoms.
I suppose I was raised on some foods you might term "Hotdish" - Shepherd's Pie, Tuna Noodle, Macaroni and Cheese, Lasagna, Seafood Casseroles, and the like - but it's not a New England term. 
Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the sombre shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring.
Mark Levin made a good point on the radio recently. While pointing out that government takes 25% of all income in the US - and still cannot come close to paying their bills, he said what I felt was important: We're all at fault.
In youth, one needs and wants stuff: a roof over one's head, maybe a spouse, transportation, some domestic machines and comforts, recreational toys (guns, tennis raquets, boats, speakers, etc), appropriate clothing, and decent schools for your kids.
There are more-or-less three sorts of non-major-mental-illness-related anxieties.
Readers know that, in Southern tradition, "birds" means Bob White quail. I am not talking about four-and-twenty blackbirds.