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.
Nobody in my family, or any of my friends' families, is graduating from college this year. I have a few high schools graduations to attend, but another month before that occurs.
Yet it is the commencement season. I was cruising the web recently and stumbled on two commentaries which I thought were excellent. One was a commencement speech redone as a 10 minute video. The other was from NPR which published snippets of graduation advice from economists. Both are linked here.
This video was based on a commencement speech from Kenyon College, several years ago. (my apologies, the original link was removed by the author's trust due to copyright issues, but the version I linked to does still work).
The letter to graduates (with link to original) is below the fold.
The train wreck in Connecticut brings to mind the classic 1999 book, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. This book spurred the development of the field of accident research, but it is somewhat dated now. Accidents are inevitable, and at some point efforts to prevent dangers creates new forms of danger.
It must be awful constantly being treated as a second-class citizen in a male-dominated society. We all know about the inequalities in the job market, corporate structure and politics, but it's exceptionally cruel when even something as simple as sports needs an official Act of Congress (Title IX) just so a college can have a girls softball team.
But perhaps the biggest reminder of your lowly status is that even your clothes are regulated. Wear this, don't wear that. Do you see men going through any such restrictions? Of course not. Your being told what to wear based on your gender is the moral equivalent of being told which bathroom you can use based on the color of your skin.
And the great progressive city of New York has decided to address this hideous injustice, once and for all.
No longer will you be castigated and restricted and confined merely because of your gender. No longer will you be forced to wear the shackles that the male-dominated society has placed upon you.
Because of the grand farsightedness of the great city of New York, you no longer have to wear the shackles at all.
The Obama administration seems to be doing its level best to convince the American people that a large and powerful federal government is a threat to liberty. From IRS zealots blatantly using their powers against political enemies to prosecutors overreaching in attacks on journalists to deranged bureaucrats attacking fundamental standards of fairness on campus, the federal government is daily demonstrating the danger of giving it too many missions.
Seen in a Holiday Inn Express parking lot in Ohio. I chatted with the Californian owner. It's a Ford F450 van, heavily customized. The extra-large gas tank is bomb-proof, and tons of other specials including the suspension. The inside is a camper. His wife likes to camp off road in the Sierras and they drive up mountains, through rivers, and over boulders.
He claims 12-15 mpg. He has driven it cross-country twice, just for fun. He refused to tell me whether he had a firearm somewhere in there. It would be stupid not to.
Several aspects of modern life seem to have been very accurately predicted by both Orwell and Huxley. Orwell’s idea of “New Speak,” for example, the deliberate remoulding and distortion of the English language by Big Brother, has been rightly compared to the politically correct manipulation of language that has become all too familiar in western societies over the past twenty to thirty years. The political purpose of “New Speak” is to control the thinking of the populace – not too different in aim from the new terms and words coined by political correctness. Huxley does not go into the language issue in the same way as Orwell, though we note too that in the Brave New World certain “offensive” words – such as “cross” – have been eliminated from public use. Thus for example Charing Cross Station in London has been renamed “Charing T Station” – after Henry Ford’s Model T automobile.
The American federal government has gone crazy, and power-mad. VDH: It Can Happen Here:
Government has become a sort of malignant metasisizing tumor, growing on its own, parasitical on healthy cells, always searching for new sources of nourishment, its purpose nothing other than growing bigger and faster and more powerful—until the exhausted host collapses. We have a sunshine king and our government has become a sort of virtual Versailles palace.
I suppose that when a presidential candidate urges his supporters to get in someone’s face, and to take a gun to a knife fight, from now on you better believe him...
Got home too late last nite to accumulate the usual stack or to peruse all the links sent to my inbox.Mechanical flight delays. Isn't air travel fun?Try amusing yourself sometime for 8 hours in the Columbus airport while remaining sober in a cigar-free zone with nothing but fat women to look at and no laptop. Like jail. Got frisked, too. The rest of my family drove home quicker than I flew home to Yankeeland.
Lovely flat farmland north of Columbus, this weekend. A little further north, the land becomes pleasantly rolling in a way which is reminiscent of New England. Corn ("maize" to you in Yorba Euroland) is just beginning to sprout. It is no wonder that ambitious New Englanders and upstate New Yorkers fled here in the early 1800s for the good farmland. 90% of Americans were in the agricultural industry at the time and they were not stupid about money. It was not about aesthetics: subsistence farming sucks. People desire profit. Farms are outdoor solar factories.
I'll post some more of my Ohio pics later. I took almost 50, which is a lot for me in 3 days.
Sugar in soda pop is no more fattening than any other carb, eg fruit, bread, milk, fruit juices like apple juice and orange juice. Nevertheless, it's not a "public health" issue, it's an individual choice issue. I like that light brown granulated sugar in my coffee.
They are most abundant here in the later summer and fall, but their numbers nosedive during the winter mostly due to predation by owls, hawks, coyotes, and Red Fox. The cottontails' position on the food chain leads to an annual survival rate of around 20%.
When we see one hop out of its nesting "form" when mowing, we mow around it.
2:1 When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2:2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 2:3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 2:4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. 2:5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 2:6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 2:7 Amazed and astonished, they asked, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 2:8 And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 2:9 Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 2:10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 2:11 Cretans and Arabs--in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power." 2:12 All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?" 2:13 But others sneered and said, "They are filled with new wine." 2:14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, "Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 2:15 Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning. 2:16 No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: 2:17 'In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. 2:18 Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. 2:19 And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. 2:20 The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day. 2:21 Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.'
Three weekends ago, my wife's company ran a volunteer day. They have one every year, and we will sign up to clean beaches, parks, or do a variety of things which benefit the community. I feel if I use the beach or the park, I should help keep it clean.
This year we signed up to help clean a shore town in New Jersey that was afflicted by Sandy. We were assigned to clean streets and lend a hand to any homeowners who requested assistance in removing trash. Others in our group were assigned to paint the Ambulance Hall. We cleaned a 2 square block area, and our team 'captain' was a local man who not only gave us guidance on what we would be doing, but also filled us in on what transpired in the town.
He pointed out that May 1st would be the 6 month anniversary of Sandy, and requests for FEMA funds would have to be in by then. He said most residents had already applied, but the funds were limited. In addition the payment wasn't enough to help those with any substantial damage. His home had filled with water up to the ceiling of the first floor and his foundation had cracked, so he was renting the house next door in order to keep his kids in the school district. FEMA was a drop in the bucket for him. Charities were few and far between in this section of NJ. He was getting by on his pension and couldn't afford to get work done on his home.
He took some of us on a brief walk around town to point out the damage. The water level had reached 4-18 feet in this 1 square mile town. 7 of the 21 bars and restaurants were open. The police were still operating out of a trailer.
The forest-dwelling, nondescript and rather common Broad-Wing is rarely seen except during fall migration. They hang out quietly in deep woods and rarely soar except during migration. I saw one the other day, probably on his way north. They breed in woodlands across the Eastern US and Canada, migrate to South America in large flocks.
Prof. B. explained why reds should be chilled a bit before serving, especially in the summer - assuming the bottles are not coming from your underground or temperature-controlled wine cellar. 55-62 degrees F, max. That's not "room temperature."
I think The Prof is absolutely right, but I had never thought it through. No wine tastes good at 76 degrees. Hot grape juice isn't good either. (my Dad calls wine "grape juice" even if it's '81 Petrus).
Same thing applies to old Ports, I think.
Rich folks have wine refrigerators that keep each type of wine at its own preferred temp. If you have one, surely you deserve to be more highly taxed.
Like many, I find hummingbirds absolutely fascinating. I mean, it's one thing if a bird can hover. That's pretty rare. Quite another if it can actually fly backwards, and almost as accurately and as fast as forwards.
One of the things the Intelligent Design people like to pull out is that evolution wasn't smart enough to invent the eye. It was, however, apparently smart enough to design a three-dimensional gyroscope. Like all birds, watch how still their heads are, no matter what gyrations their bodies are going through.
Their tail feathers also perform an interesting role. Notice how it's almost like the birds are hinged on a rod running through their wings and the tail feathers act as a 'tilting' mechanism. One quick flap and they tilt up or down on the axis running through their wings. Truly a marvelous animal.
BD's in the delightful midwestern hamlet of Ohio this weekend, so I'll be doing today's morning links. He didn't tell me where he was going, but I'm guessing it's that big Two-Seed-In-The-Spirit Predestinarian Baptist revival they're having when they ordain the new ministers. Given all the pomp and circumstance, I think you'll admit, a two-day visit would be hard to turn down.
Interesting News
In the old days, an article on how to avoid an IRS audit would be titled, "How To Avoid An IRS Audit".
Much like drone technology and printed guns, Glass will be used in both directions, good and bad. A number of casinos and bars have already banned them — and they're not even on the market yet. At some point, sure enough some Congressman is going to have his career ruined because someone innocently wearing Glass accidentally caught him using a hideous, derogatory word like macaca. It was on YouTube a minute later and that was that.
On the other hand, picture a fireman fighting inside a massive blaze and having his Glass direct him to the room the children are cowering in. So it'll be interesting to see what springs forth.
I mentioned in my little diatribe on marijuana that, while D.C. Congress has been dragging its feet, individual states have been taking the initiative.
Individual states like the one D.C. Congress is actually in:
The movement to legalize marijuana has arrived at Congress' back door.
Later this month the first medical cannabis dispensaries are expected to open in the nation's capital, including one just eight blocks from the Capitol dome.
Which isn't to say that D.C. is the only one joining in the fun:
For two decades, progressives have castigated those questioning global warming as "deniers."
But the Economist, once firmly in the alarmist camp, recently acknowledged that global temperatures have remained stagnant for 15 years even as greenhouse-gas emissions have soared.
This may be because existing models have overestimated the planet's sensitivity. Or because the heat generated is sinking to the ocean bottom. Or because of something else completely.
How should a scientifically inclined liberal react to this trend? By inhaling deeply and backing off on economy-busting mitigation measures till science offers clearer answers.
And how have liberals reacted? By sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting la-la-la.
Uh-yup. We've shown this over and over again on this site. Even when these same great scientific minds claim that global colding is the real menace here, they turn a blind eye and continue their hearty endeavors.
Under the heading of "Damn!", I was hoping the new Star Trek 'prequel' would be as good as the first. But it ain't worth dogshit according to this reviewer:
On the other end of the spectrum, I thought 'Django Unchained' was the best movie I'd seen in a year. I'll do a review on it sometime. There's an interesting connection to make between it and 'Blazing Saddles'. Any guesses?
On the 'NCIS' front, I watched the last five episodes of the season the other day. I sat there petrified the entire time, worrying that they'd dig up (not literally this time) good ol' Pedro Hernandez — Gibbs' nemesis from his NIS past. They did, but thankfully moved on, and I was left just as bewildered at the end as anyone.
One thing I didn't think through were the other three team members. I would have half-figured they'd picked their badges back up when Gibbs went rogue (?), but the article indicates that they held true and resigned en masse, so we should get some interesting background stories about their 4-month escapades this fall. There's a recent interview with Mark Harman here.
I have a number of articles about this great show here.
Political News
Politically, I thought the most touchingly poignant moment of the week was when renown historian James Douglas Muir Leno recalled the Obama early years and our fondness for Joe Biden at the time, and how sad it is how V.P. Biden's glory has faded over the years.
I spoke with a Mom yesterday. She mentioned that her daughter was a high school junior, intending to apply to college. I asked what the kid was interested in. She said "Well, she likes to watch movies. Not much else. She hates school and is not a very good student. She doesn't really study." I replied, "So, why college?" She told me that the kid likes her social life and "wants the college experience. She also wants a diploma."
It's a topic of great concern and interest to me. We have already seen serious depletion of some fish species (eg Halibut, Atlantic Cod, others). It's a free-for-all, and the scarcer the fish get, the higher the prices they fetch.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a piece about Jason Collins and one comment made a comparison to the gay Jason Collins getting all the media attention, while Tim Tebow was being run out of the NFL for being a vocal Christian. I think the first part was true, while the second part was primarily a longshot opinion. There are too many Christians, and some very vocal ones, like Kurt Warner, who have played the game and not suffered.
I do believe Christians in the US suffer far more media abuse than gangster rappers, but that's another story. I'm writing this about Tebow, who I happen to like. He's a smart kid, a hard worker, and a good leader.
But sometimes even that just isn't enough. While his introduction to the NFL signaled an appreciable change in the nature of the QB position, unfortunately his skill set is not up to snuff.
That said, the guy still has more playoff wins in Denver than a certain Peyton Manning. Which perhaps says more about Tebow than it does Manning.
We all remember how presidential candidate Barack Obama promised that his government would be the 'most transparent' in history.
Well, while there have been a few instances in recent years where it could be argued that total transparency was not forthcoming, here we are on the edge of three major political scandals where transparency must be forthcoming; the IRS targeting the Tea Party and specific Republican donors, the Justice Department illegally wiretapping AP reporters, and the shame of Benghazi and claiming the violence was merely a YouTube video review gone bad, a story they perpetrated for three weeks.
But there's good news on the horizon.
Because, with the incredible public scrutiny these stories are garnering — at least, after the press, itself, was targeted — it seems fairly obvious that key players like Department of Justice head Eric Holder and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney will open up to the American public and finally tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help them God.
Here's Mr. Holder finally putting to rest some of the key questions that arose at the recent congressional hearing:
Mr. Carney also elaborated on a number of details in a stalwart effort to clean the slate:
What's that? You think they seemed a bit evasive?
You're obviously missing the point.
Compared to the past five years, this is being transparent!
The only thing new about Obamacare is its mandatory nature, its lack of choice, and its one-size-fits-all. It's antiquated thinking, like subsidizing mandatory buggy whips.
Government programs like this inhibit change, innovation, flexibility, and creativity, and hand control to government bureaucrats. When Prof. Mead discusses evolving alternatives to the old fee-for-service model of primary care, he might be forgetting that Obamacare has set it in stone just as Medicare did for the over-65.
Left alone, medical care would evolve according to markets and peoples' choices. As we have surmised before, Obamacare was designed to fail and to bring in single payer, also a blast from the past which would inhibit innovation.
As our paleontological readers know, we are currently living in an Ice Age, right now in a minor somewhat warm (but not today) interglacial respite between the last and the next major glacial incursion.
History does matter, boys and girls. The most recent major interglacial (as opposed to the mini warm spells as in the past few thousand years) is known as the Eemian Interglacial. It lasted around 15,000 years, beginning about 130,000 years ago, and ended with our current ice age cycle.
At the peak of the Eemian, the northern hemisphere winters were generally warmer and wetter than now, though some areas were actually slightly cooler than today. The Hippopotamus was distributed as far north as the rivers Rhine and Thames…Trees grew as far north as southern Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago instead of only as far north as Kuujjuaq in northern Quebec, and the prairie-forest boundary in the Great Plains of the United States lay further west — near Lubbock, Texas, instead of near Dallas, Texas, where the boundary now exists. The period closed as temperatures steadily fell to conditions cooler and drier than the present, with 468-year long aridity pulse in central Europe…and by 114,000 years ago, a glacial period had returned.
The Eemian was the time when Homo sapiens began moving north out of Africa and the Middle East.
Sometimes it's a good idea to put things in perspective. Just for fun, here's the past 500 million years of climate change. We're still in an alarming and great 50-million year glacial, cold period, period with ups and downs within it. It's a fact that the earth, right now, is about as cold as it has ever been in the past half-billion years.
That's the big picture. Here's more detail, of just the past 65 million years but even on this scale the Eemian doesn't show:
If they hate fossil fuel, they should first set an example by giving up their cars, computers, cell phones, heat, and air conditioning. Nobody is stopping them from wearing pinwheels on their heads for wind power.
For some reason, these guys never followed up on all the stories about Obama hanging out in gay bars in Chicago. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
One of the Bird Dog daughters, and my lad, know that it is easy to please Dad with a selection of stinky, strong, expensive imported cheeses from The Grand Central Market in NY. At Sunday's Mom's Day cookout we had a killer cheese platter. Even a goat brie, which was a first for me.
All present were lovers of rare and strong cheeses. Since I have heard Steve Jenkins interviewed on the radio a few times recently, I began to pontificate about what I had learned from him. (He is the cheese-buyer for Fairway, the world's most prominent cheese pro, and author of the Cheese Primer.)
Jenkins preaches serving cheese with fruit, nuts, or honey - never without. To demonstrate his correctness on the topic, I pulled some hot pepper jelly (like this) and some fig preserves out of our dying fridge. Fresh fruit is good too, but I am partial to the preserves. I think everybody present was converted.
Our error was in offering the cheese board before the steaks, instead of after. The savoury course. Well, nobody's perfect.
Dear Maggie's Valued Female Reader™:
Cool reconstruction 
We discussed salt last week. Here's 
North America hosts a number of species and subspecies of 
Acts 2:1-21
Prof. B. explained why 
BD's in the delightful midwestern hamlet of Ohio this weekend, so I'll be doing today's morning links. He didn't tell me where he was going, but I'm guessing it's that big Two-Seed-In-The-Spirit Predestinarian Baptist revival they're having when they ordain the new ministers. Given all the pomp and circumstance, I think you'll admit, a two-day visit would be hard to turn down.
3-D printed dress, 
As our paleontological readers know, we are currently living in an Ice Age, right now in a minor somewhat warm (but not today) interglacial respite between the last and the next major glacial incursion.
One of the Bird Dog daughters, and my lad, know that it is easy to please Dad with a selection of stinky, strong, expensive imported cheeses from The Grand Central Market in NY. At Sunday's Mom's Day cookout we had a killer cheese platter. Even a goat brie, which was a first for me.