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.
Mayor Bloomberg wants New Yorkers to compost their garbage. Where? In the hallway of the Plaza Hotel?
Who is "we", by the way? Royal "we"?
As we (Royal "We") frequently say at Maggie's, "If you're so rich, how come you ain't smart?"
NYC remains the greatest city in the world, and the most fun to visit with endless interesting things to do and jammed with smart, ambitious people from all over the world, but it has plenty of issues to be tackled: public education, debt, too much welfare, union control of everything, governmental over-regulation of everything including the housing market, etc. However, Bloomberg focuses on the small, elitist, feel-good issues: smoking, composting, diet, salt, gays, illegal immigration, and other baloney. Why?
We suspect it's because he gave up on the hard issues a few years ago, and decided to deal with the little stuff. He's a Jewish mother at heart, and a pain in the ass. "It's raining. Don't go out without your rubbers." "They're in my wallet, Ma." Rainy Day Women.
I agree with Palin that Americans, much less tough New Yorkers, do not need to be treated like children and neither need to be, nor want to be, preached to by anybody other than a pastor, priest, or a rabbi. I lived there for a while and love to visit, and it's not a place for sissies. It always was a good place to meet tall, elegant and refined debutantes with pedigrees acceptable to my Mother. I did, a long time ago, and so far, so good.
NOCD was the kiss of death when I was young. Snobs.
Today, Congress exercises police powers never granted by the Constitution. Conservatives who favor federal “wars” on drugs, gambling and other behaviors should understand the damage they have done to the constitutional underpinnings of limited government.
As she says, it's not from The Onion. The guy in the video is smart but pitifully emasculated. I guess it goes with the territory. Every assertion he makes ends with a question mark. Lame, and not a word about education.
Almost every aspect of illegal immigration is illiberal to the core. Respect for the law? The elite decides that for a particular political constituency, the law is now fluid. If you are a Bulgarian M.D. and overstay your visa, beware. A Korean engineer wouldn’t dare to fly to Mexico City and cross illegally into Arizona. Without ethnic bosses and millions of compatriots within our borders, all others are lawbreakers subject to deportation.
When life gets out of control, and there is nothing to eat in the beautiful new Sub Zero fridge (10 year warranty) because nobody has gotten to the market, and you have a day job and the Mrs. has her hands full, it's time for a Thai delivery.
We have mother-in-law in the rehab center with a new steel knee, father in law staying with us, and my dad in the hosp with a new rod in his fractured hip needing rehab as soon as his post-op confusion resolves. Not to mention Father's Day weekend to bury my Mom's ashes at the farm, and not to mention other forms of family medical and other chaos too which I will not mention.
We have two excellent Thai places around, and both deliver. I alternate between the two, because they have different styles. Delivery fellow comes faster if you give a decent tip, which for me is $5. Tonight we're getting this:
Duck Spring Rolls Chicken Satay with hot sauce Penang Curry with Chicken (hot peanut curry sauce) Drunken Noodles with Tofu - plus extra hot sauce, and White Rice (brown rice is disgusting, detracts from the flavor of the dish, and is not fit for human consumption)
On the top of Maggie's Farm, we seem to reject being subject to the efforts of do-gooders. Is the road to hell paved with good intentions? Do-gooders always seem to either want my money, or want to control me.
In just eight dense pages, Prof. Oakley covers a lot of ground and goes far beyond the Law of Unintended Consequences. She touches on psychology, science, medicine, philosophy, and politics. It's a remarkable paper which indeed pulls enough threads together to represent a potential paradigm shift. One quote:
The bottom line is that the heartfelt, emotional basis of our good intentions can mislead us about what is truly helpful for others. Altruistic intentions must be run through the sieve of rational analysis; all too often, the best long-term action to help others, at both personal and public scales, is not immediately or intuitively obvious, not what temporarily makes us feel good, and not what is being promoted by other individuals, with their own potentially self-serving interests.
Indeed, truly altruistic actions may some-times appear cruel or harmful, the equivalent of saying no to the student who demands a higher grade or to the addict who needs another hit. However, the social consequences of appearing cruel in a culture that places high value on kindness, empathy, and altruism can lead us to misplaced "helpful" behavior and result in self-deception regarding the consequences of our actions.
I am a fan of Rhubarb. It's tangy. Best rhubarb dish? Rhubarb cobbler with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
Rhubarb won't grow much in the southern US. It requires cold winters and does not enjoy long, hot summers. A good thing about the plants is that they are perennial and last for many years. In fact, a rhubarb patch will last forever if you divide the plants every few years. They are fairly heavy feeders and like a good dose of manure regularly. The leaves are so dense that a patch doesn't really grow weeds.
When I was a kid, my Mom had the rhubarb patch right outside the horse barn, and she would routinely toss some horse poop on it. The fresh poop did not seem to bother the rhubarb.
The only problem I have had with growing rhubarb is its bolting and rapidly going to seed. That needs to be prevented by cutting off the flowering stalks promptly before they grow tall.
Mrs. BD loves flowers and all that - she and her pals call it "plant material" because they use all sorts of things in their design efforts.
Often, however, she will just toss flowers in a vase without too much design except basic color coordination and texture variation, and it is very pleasant.
Here are her tips to keep cut flowers looking good in water for a week or more:
- A fresh sharp cut to each stem at a 45 degree angle, and warm water
- 1 tsp of bleach per quart of water (prevents rotten, cloudy water which destroys the blooms)
- 1 tablespoon of sugar per quart of water (feeds the flowers - they aren't dead yet)
- Never let a leaf be submerged - but you can submerge blooms if you want for cool effects. You can submerge Hosta leaves too.
They will have your medical records too. They need your medical records.Everybody's. Not to worry, because they won't tell anybody about your herpes or your Bipolar Disorder.
My heart beamed Friday night as my sons welcomed the Sabbath with perfectly sung prayers.My heart broke Saturday night as my sons fought while I grilled a perfect wild-caught salmon, and I got indigestion instead of the meal I thought I deserved.
I'm reminded of the saying, "A Man's children and his garden both reflect the amount of weeding done during the growing season." And, the growing goes both ways as we fathers grow, have to grow -- into the men we want to be under our children's careful observation, into the men that they need.
We yearn to please but, most important, to pass on life's lessons.
Father's Day is full of platitudes and real feelings, of missed and appreciated opportunities. And, of how much we care by just being there. I'm reminded of GeorgeStrait's "A Father's Love", of Conway Twitty's "That's My Job", of Rascal Flatt's "My Wish."True, heartfelt, and missing the tougher choices we have to make and impose to make as sure as we can that our children grow into responsible, resilient and caring adults.
There's a wisecrack, "If God is so perfect, how do you explain us."As fathers, we're not perfect, but we try to find and know the ways to be better, and most of us find it. We continue to strive, and so may our children, with a higher hand to reach for and give us the strength to be better and have hope.
Amusing, and heart-warming, to see how this gal who gamed the college diversity scam got in touch with her true inner racial identity, and was able to build a career on it.
At a paltry 6,900 yards, probably the shortest U.S. Open since the last time they played at Merion in 1981, the pundits were all raving about how it wouldn't stand up to the modern beefed-up player and his technological bag of tricks in the form of 12th-generation Big Bertha drivers and multi-faceted computer-generated putters. They were predicting scores of 8 or 9 under par, easy.
The current tied two leaders after two days of play?
1 under.
There are three playing at even par and the entire rest of the field is in the plus column.
Like I said, a spanking.
Of the four masters, the Open is usually considered the 'nastiest' of the lot. While the others might rely upon ultra-long holes, ultra-slick greens and ultra-tough pin placements, the Open is usually defined by a zillion sand traps and rough that goes halfway up your calf.
And there's even more to it than that, such as the toughness of the grass. Merion uses a particularly tough grass around the greens, a lesson Tiger Woods handily learned just yesterday. The ball was a few feet off the green, embedded in some short, gnarly rough. He took the proper swack at it and the ball plopped about 10 inches. He took another swack and it flopped onto the green a few feet and stopped nine feet from the pin. Welcome to Merion Golf Club, Mr. Woods, still catering to that old, pre-modern tough-love style.
They also don't have pin flags at Merion; they use straw baskets which were originally used to store the players' lunches so they'd stay safely out of reach of deer, caddies, and other course varmints. What this means is that the players are forced to use such ancient, archaic means of determining wind direction as "blowing tree branches" and "clouds". This 'getting back to the basics' approach is enough to throw the strongest player off his game.
Broadcast time is noon (ET), NBC. Original info and slideshow here, updates here. Live streaming is here, fairly decent full-screen quality.
What's going to add to a spanking good time is that Merion was drenched with rain in the week up through Thursday, so it's actually been playing slow these last two days. As things dry out, the fairways will become even faster (giving the ball an even greater chance of rolling off into the rough, something that happened over and over again on a couple of particular holes yesterday, even to the greats like Mickelson and Woods) and, of course, the greens will make a big jump on the Stimpmeter. They were already in the 'scary' category yesterday (it was raining Thursday to the point where they were basically putting around small lakes, so yesterday was the first day in which the course could actually be judged), so today should take a fairly dramatic jump in green speeds.
There's something somewhat interesting about the game of golf:
It's not a game.
It's not a sport.
It's not a contest.
It's not a competition.
It's not really much at all.
It's just you, a field, a ball and some clubs, and the only fellow competitor within sight is a man who might have died twenty years before.
It can be made into a sport, of course, but golf, in its essence, involves no one but you and the course designer, perhaps long passed on these many years.
Even when others are on the field, you're not playing against these players. There's none of the sez you mentality you see in normal sports. It's just you, the course, and the fewest number of swings you can make to see it through to the end.
Except for the pros, where they really do have the option of cutting the corner by knocking it over the trees on a par-5 dogleg, for everyone else there's really just one shot in the bag, and you really want nothing more than for it to be your best shot — and the score and fellow competitors be damned.
In that moment you step up to the ball, it is nothing but essence.
This clip from The Legend of Bagger Vance demonstrates this fairly well.
Parents who read their kids stories about happy, human-like animals like Franklin the Turtle or Arthur at bedtime are exposing their kids to racism, materialism, homophobia and patriarchal norms, according to a paper presented at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
AFOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I myself am good fortune; Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, 5 Strong and content, I travel the open road.
The earth—that is sufficient; I do not want the constellations any nearer; I know they are very well where they are; I know they suffice for those who belong to them. 10
(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens; I carry them, men and women—I carry them with me wherever I go; I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them; I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)
2
You road I enter upon and look around! I believe you are not all that is here; 15 I believe that much unseen is also here.
Here the profound lesson of reception, neither preference or denial; The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas’d, the illiterate person, are not denied; The birth, the hasting after the physician, the beggar’s tramp, the drunkard’s stagger, the laughing party of mechanics, The escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple, 20 The early market-man, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the town, the return back from the town, They pass—I also pass—anything passes—none can be interdicted; None but are accepted—none but are dear to me.
3
You air that serves me with breath to speak! You objects that call from diffusion my meanings, and give them shape! 25 You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers! You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides! I think you are latent with unseen existences—you are so dear to me.
You flagg’d walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges! You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you timber-lined sides! you distant ships! 30 You rows of houses! you window-pierc’d façades! you roofs! You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards! You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much! You doors and ascending steps! you arches! You gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings! 35 From all that has been near you, I believe you have imparted to yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to me; From the living and the dead I think you have peopled your impassive surfaces, and the spirits thereof would be evident and amicable with me.
The rest of "Song of the Open Road" is below the fold -
Whitman worked on his collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, for almost 50 years, until his death. There were continual revisions and additions to the various editions of the remarkable and somewhat scandalous book. Whitman, like the "I" in the poems, was a self-invented American Everyman, and he fully believed that it was his destiny to write the Great American Epic Poem. It's not one story, but I think he did write an epic in spirit. It's fun to look at, and to read about, this collection of Whitman photos.
I think everybody's ideal is to have an internist or family practice doc who knows you well personally as well as medically, and where you can call or come in anytime if you have a concern. For various reasons this has become elusive.
Based on what I have seen, three trends are growing. The first is the Doc-in-a-Box or, more likely, a PA in a pharmacy.
The second is concierge medicine in which, for a modest annual fee, you have unlimited contact - 24/7 - with your generalist.
The third is generalist docs who will not accept insurance but who charge modest fees and will offer a bill that you can send for your own reimbursement, if any. They can charge modest fees because they do not need to hire a large back office staff for coding and billing.
It's a good idea to have a generalist who knows you and your family. With ObamaCare, I think all three of these modes will grow in popularity, especially the last one. They are all working mostly outside the system. They are not likely to want to make time to see you, however, unless they have met you (except for the PA in a box trend).
Generalist physicians, whether Family Practice, Internal Medicine, or whatever, are the ultimate docs. They see everything, major and minor, and know when to refer. People who want to use their Medicare and Medicaid are going to have a tough time with office visits in the future.
I had always aspired to be a country doc, a generalist, in the New Hampshire countryside, but became too fascinated with what I now do. I had dreams of fixing broken arms, stitching up nasty cuts, treating poison ivy, delivering babies, consoling the terminal, sending appendicitis patients to a surgeon friend, etc. It's kind of funny, but my generalist friends tell me that half of their work is Psychiatry anyway.
With the training I had, I suspect that I could still do those country doc things pretty well, but my malpractice insurance does not cover it. In my training, I caught 42 babies. Some were dangerous and complicated. As I have admitted here in the past, I refused to participate in abortions not because I am so religious but because I did not want it in my memory.
As one who has spent a lifetime studying the humanities, my advice for students is to take their business elsewhere. Until humanists can offer an education that truly prepares one for life -- not just with a marketable degree, but with an education of wisdom and hope -- I would consider a degree in accounting or computer science. Then, after work, one can read all the Shakespeare one likes and not have to be informed that the bard was a racist, an anti-Semite, and gender-challenged to boot.
I think these teen transgenders are probably just terribly mixed-up confused people. Some days I feel like I am trapped inside a human body, and not a particularly wonderful body either.
But I cope with it. I am taking a cute little gal on a fishing trip off Block Island this weekend. How good is that for June 15? Is that a keeper?
What could go wrong? And what are we doing in a Syrian civil and religious war anyway? Do we have a dog in that fight? Those are my tax dollars (more accurately, dollars borrowed from China in my name. Our Chinese credit card).
I have written about the history of the concept of retirement several times, over the years. Basically, I tend to believe that retirement is a bad idea for body and soul. My house painter is 74, and he claims work keeps him young and permits him to take better trips than he could otherwise afford.
Twenty-five years ago, when the New York City public school system seemed permanently mired in mediocrity, a New York Times reporter asked me, “Alright, what’s the answer?”
I said, without thinking really, “One hundred nuns.”
Government requires trust. Government by progressives, however, demands such inordinate amounts of trust that the demand itself should provoke distrust. Progressivism can be distilled into two words: “Trust us.” The antecedent of the pronoun is: The wise, disinterested experts through whom the vast powers of the regulatory state’s executive branch will deliver progress for our own good, as the executive branch understands this, whether we understand it or not. Lois Lerner is the scowling face of this state, which has earned Americans’ distrust.
Whatever inchoate anxieties predated this presidency are now worse: a politics rife with suspicion and retribution, and most of the people believing the government, for starters, threatens their freedom.
“Did you kill any babies, Bruce?” As we lay in bed on New Year’s Eve 1970, this is what the girl asked who a friend had introduced me to when I returned from Vietnam a couple of months before. I got up and drove home in the snowy streets from Queens to Brooklyn. I didn’t even try to date another girl for almost a year after. But, I moved past it and didn’t dwell on that night.
Some returned soldiers and Marines had worse experiences and some had better and almost all just blended back in after an initial adjustment. Studies show that most were more successful in their lives than their non-serving peers. But, what the major media and liberal opinion-setters painted was an image, usually grossly ignorant and mendacious, of a mentally and morally scarred Vietnam veteran. The purpose was to reduce support for the US commitment to South Vietnam. It took several decades before this image from the Left was reversed and due pride in veterans’ service returned to America. Yet, that erroneous and harmful image of Vietnam veterans still lingers in many minds.
Aside from the opprobrium poured upon us Vietnam veterans from the Left in the pop culture and academia, the goal of our war was lost and we had little reason to exhibit pride in the outcome of our service as millions of IndoChinese were murdered by the conquering communists in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The perfidy of so many of our Senators and Congressmen, and the indifference of most opinion-leaders, only deepened the alienation from authority, and increased the vulnerability to the anti-Vietnam messagers.
That’s what the fall of Saigon has to do with the life paths of Vietnam veterans.
Rarely do two books appear on widely different aspects of the Vietnam War which based on meticulous research weave an understanding of the still confusing Vietnam War that, as Paul Harvey used to say, tells us “the rest of the story.”
Pr(A|X) = Chance of having cancer (A) given a positive test (X).
This is what we want to know: How likely is it to have cancer with a
positive result? In our case it was 7.8%.
Pr(X|A) = Chance of a positive test (X) given that you had cancer (A). This is the chance of a true positive, 80% in our case.
Pr(A) = Chance of having cancer (1%).
Pr(~A) = Chance of not having cancer (99%).
Pr(X|~A) = Chance of a positive test (X) given that you didn’t have cancer (~A). This is a false positive, 9.6% in our case.
We've all known for a while that the DHS has been building a potent paramilitary organization. The justification for that eludes me. Of course, the FBI and ATF are paramilitary too. What am I missing among federal paramilitary agencies?
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 5th July, 2005: “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant….”
That was written 8 years ago but I believe, to be more accurate, there has been slight cooling since 1995, not 98.
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 7th May, 2009: ‘Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’
"Worried"? I thought we were supposed to get worried if it got warmer, not if it didn't...but I don't really care what the weather does. I like any and all weathers except for tornadoes.
Diamonds are not scarce, are not investments (they depreciate), and are no more "forever" than any other rock. Their popularity as stones in engagement rings dates to the 1930s with DeBeers' very effective marketing campaign.
We covet diamonds in America for a simple reason: the company that stands to profit from diamond sales decided that we should. De Beers’ marketing campaign single-handedly made diamond rings the measure of one’s success in America. Despite its complete lack of inherent value, the company manufactured an image of diamonds as a status symbol. And to keep the price of diamonds high, despite the abundance of new diamond finds, De Beers executed the most effective monopoly of the 20th century. Okay, we get it De Beers, you guys are really good at business!
De Beers believes that a fellow should spend two month's income on a diamond. Wiki has a brief history of engagement rings and wedding rings.
Carpe Diem recommends fake diamonds, and real love and reliable companionship.
Sugar protectionism is government planning. It is industrial policy —
government picking winners and losers — applied to agriculture. It is
politics supplanting the market in allocating wealth and opportunity.
And it is perfectly all right with 20 of the 45 Republican senators.
On the Atlantic coast from Nova Scotia down to the Gulf of Mexico, it's molting season for the Blue Crab.
Some people don't mind picking the meat out of these delicious Blue Crabs for crab salad, crab cakes, a crab boil, or She-crab soup, but my preference is Soft-Shelled, right after the molt. You just eat the whole juicy thing, feathers and all. No waste whatsoever.
Sometimes you will get a batch of crabs whose new shells have begun to firm up a little too much, and are too chewy. I don't like that. Chewy is fine, but hard is not.
If you have any sauteed crabs left-over in the fridge, you can put one on white bread with some mayonnaise and salt and pepper, and it might be the best sandwich in the world.
Climatology Prof. Salby explains why the climate models are wrong. It's slightly technical for our handicapped challenged readers who can't do fairly simple math and is intended for a sophisticated audience, but the message is clear. (h/t Powerline)
He is not, of course, the first to note that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere lag behind temperature rises, but he makes a compelling presentation. (It begins in German but quickly switches to English.)
This is a serious man. "The models have no predictive skill."
Would it be criminal to call this guy an un-American jackass? This guy ought to watch the harassment that takes place in every Question Time in the Brit Parliament. The guy is pathetic. Harassment of others is poor manners, but frequently necessary in life because so many deserve it. Including him.
Mrs. BD loves flowers and all that - she and her pals call it "plant material" because they use all sorts of things in their design efforts. 
Amusing: 
"What is so rare as a steak in June?"
The U.S. Open golf tournament is on this weekend.
There's something somewhat interesting about the game of golf:
Image via 
AFOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road, 
I think everybody's ideal is to have an internist or family practice doc who knows you well personally as well as medically, and where you can call or come in anytime if you have a concern. For various reasons this has become elusive. 
Where should transgender teens pee when at school? In some precincts, this seems to be a burning civil rights issue.
From George Will's 
Diamonds are not scarce, are not investments (they depreciate), and are no more "forever" than any other rock. Their popularity as stones in engagement rings dates to the 1930s with DeBeers' very effective marketing campaign.
On the Atlantic coast from Nova Scotia down to the Gulf of Mexico, it's molting season for the