Maggie's Farm

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.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Much Sorry with Delays
Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
Peach update, with pie
NYC update
Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
Water Shoes
Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
Good news about The Great Courses
Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

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Wednesday, August 3. 2011

Weds. late morning links

Scroll down to our recent posts - our humble site hit it out of the park in the past 24 hrs during these summer doldrums (even tho we strive to always be interesting).


Do us a favor, if you haven't already done so: Give the folks you know a chance to learn about Maggie's. They might enjoy us.


I'm going to the beach.


MSM blackballing: How deep and far back does it go?


TSA to put Hub fliers on the spot


Rush has O’s campaign theme


Union Terrorists Drive Rhode Island City Into Bankruptcy


America fights on while Europe surrenders to Germany:



After a nine year binge of borrowing and spending; euro members began defaulting. Early in the European Sovereign Debt Crisis; euro states announced agreements in principal to solve isolated cases of small countries experiencing “temporary setbacks” with short term loans. First Greece; then Ireland; then Portugal; then Spain; then Italy; and now virtually every euro member except Germany is experiencing rising financial stress. The euro-debt burdens are so onerous; defaulting nations have no capacity to ever pay back their bondholding banks; making their banks also insolvent.


The supposed euro benefits allowed Germany to lure its neighbors into debt traps. Defaulting euro-members could then chose to either; start a new currency and suffer the same brutal inflationary consequences as Germany’s Weimar Republic after World War One; or surrender to Germany as the only power in Europe with the economic size and financial wealth to stabilize the euro-system. In the end, bureaucrats from all seventeen euro-members nations agreed to give control of future bailouts to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), a secretive private bank managed and funded by Germany. The ESFS has authority to loan money and impose whatever financial conditions it would like on borrowers. Over the next two years ESFS will bailout Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and their banks. Austria; Belgium; and Italy will soon follow and France and her banks eventually flirt with insolvency. The European Sovereign Debt Crisis is over; Germany won.



World War 2 is over: Germany wins.

Signs of failure emerging in Obama's poll numbers


Wehner: The Comforting Life of Ideological Fanatics


Trillions of dollars have been spent on poverty programs, so why are the poor no better off?


Even this reasonable piece misses the real points: America has no permanent underclass, the poor in America are not poor by any world standards, bad choices result in bad results, and many people do not chose material gain as their life goal. I have talked to poor people, I know poor people.


Sowell: How Images Of 'Poor,' 'Elderly' Distort Reality


Federal officials investigate eagle deaths at DWP wind farm


Dick Morris sees landslide loss in Obama’s future


Dick is often wrong about things

Democrats play the race card over voter ID laws.


Trying to keep black folks scared


Economic destruction by Commerce Clause – farm equipment edition


Insty: HOW BAD IS THE ECONOMY?


U.S. Education Dep’t Pushes Man-Made Global Warming, Saving the Earth at Children’s Reading Event


They didn't get the memo

Posted by Bird Dog in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 11:06 | Comments (14) | Trackbacks (0)

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One can willingly lead a life of leisure in relative comfort and safety as a "poor person." Some of my youth was spent in such a family and it took a conscious choice to live otherwise. Beer, pot, and cable TV anesthesitizes any sense of boredom or guilt. The major downside is the time spent sitting in the welfare office.

We have a safety net that's too safe in this country.
#1 Whitehall on 2011-08-03 11:58 (Reply)
Re: World War 2 is over: Germany wins.

They need to be careful or they'll get sucked into the black hole that is the EU. They, with the French who are not in as good a shape as Germany, have be fronting money to the economic disasters called Greece and Portugal. That can't last. Also, their biggest banks have been getting hit pretty hard lately.
#2 mudbug on 2011-08-03 12:14 (Reply)
Isn't it all a bit strange? When you read the list of banks that are on the hook for money they loaned to the Euro basket cases like Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal, you have to wonder what the banks were thinking when they plunked down their dough on such losers. Banks in Germany dumped money into Italy, banks in Italy poured money into Spain, banks in Spain threw good money after bad in Greece, and so on. Banks all over the continent became interconnected by the loans they made to borrowers in other countries. I suppose by putting their money into different pots instead of just one, they thought they were "spreading the risk" around. Well yeah, except instead of lowering their risk, they ended up exposing themselves to more risk, not less. Now as one weak country shows signs of going belly up, it's pulling the other ones down with it.

Next time, if there is a next time, the smart ones will think better of it and put their money into Switzerland instead.
#2.1 Agent Cooper on 2011-08-03 18:17 (Reply)
as a rule, m always optimistic, we have more tools now then we ever did, and in some regards, julian simon like, things have never been as good, so there's f n hope; just feels nice complaining sometimes.
#2.1.1 observor on 2011-08-03 21:43 (Reply)
One reason we still have so much "poverty" after spending so much money is definitional. We define poverty relative to some economic threshold and the metrics used to measure it change over time. (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/threshld/index.html)

We move both the line of scrimmage and the goal posts as time goes by. The programs put in place, and the money spent through them, were never intended to eliminate or severely reduce poverty. They were intended to spend money and buy votes - nothing more complicated then that.

If we had wanted to eliminate or seriously reduce poverty, we should have taken some absolute definition and measured against it. For example, according to dictionary.com

pov·er·ty

noun
1. the state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support; condition of being poor; indigence.
2. deficiency of necessary or desirable ingredients, qualities, etc.: poverty of the soil.
3. scantiness; insufficiency: Their efforts to stamp out disease were hampered by a poverty of medical supplies.

By such an absolute definition, it would be difficult to claim poverty for people who have adequate housing, food, clothing, entertainment, access to transportation and other things, both tangible and intangible, that are often considered luxuries or, at least, comforts.

Many of our "impoverished" own homes or have access to housing that, if not wonderful, is certainly adequate, have sufficient food to become fat, enough access to medical care to visit their pharmacy regularly with prescriptions for hosts of ailments, have automobiles or access to other transportation, TVs, air-conditioners, and so on. Only at this point in human history has such wealth been labeled "poverty".
#3 Knucklehead (Link) on 2011-08-03 14:29 (Reply)
Sunday i see a 60 Minutes episode that tells of a Brazilian economy that is growing at 7.5 % a year. Brazilians speak Portuguese, so do the people in Portugal? Nobody else does. Isn''t there an economic bridge between these nations? Or is that, in part, buffered by the Euro?
#4 observor on 2011-08-03 16:23 (Reply)
I keep linking to Maggie's on my facebook account. I've shared it with my Ron Paul group, I've told all my relatives about it. I'm spreading the love!!
#5 Rick on 2011-08-03 17:06 (Reply)
And obesity is a problem for our poverty-stricken people. How can that be?
#6 Sam L. on 2011-08-03 18:21 (Reply)
re Economic destruction by Commerce Clause – farm equipment edition.

Wow. That is going to stir up a hornets' nest.

It could give the Iowa POTUS field a new question to answer.

I suspect that even if it is decreed, enforcement will be less than enthusiastic.
#7 feeblemind on 2011-08-03 18:57 (Reply)
BD,

I've passed along a referral to many friends to check out "another.com...another.com...".

I've yet to hear a bad word.

The Canuck
#8 Garry on 2011-08-03 20:56 (Reply)
QUOTE:
Throughout socialistic literature there is the well-known insistence upon the materialistic interpretation of history - a conception based upon a hunger for things of material enjoyment, and for more and more of them. Fundamentally, they have as much centred their aim on an increase in material possessions as the veriest Napoleon of finance in Wall Street. An existence in which the acquisition of more material wealth is of very large - if not of chief - importance is in the thoughts of both. The ends sought for by the socialists are not, in effect, different from those of the mass of non-socialists who are striving to acquire wealth in order to have ease and leisure for enjoyment. Agreeing in their aims, their differences - which seem to most persons to place them as wide apart as the poles - really consist in choosing different means of accomplishing their ends. The ordinary hustler for wealth, without or within the stock market, may have no definite moral restraint except the fear of the law (in fact, he may even contrive to escape the law), and he accepts existing institutions; but he plans to gain his end, if honest, by productive processes and trade; or, if dishonest, by a thousand ingenious ways of transferring to himself the wealth created by others. On the other hand, the socialist proposes to overturn industrial competition and the institution of private property in the hope - vaguely outlined and not economically analyzed - of transferring the use of wealth from those who have to those who have not. "Socialism a Philosophy of Failure" Scribner's Magazine, 1887
#9 JKB on 2011-08-03 23:11 (Reply)
The windfarm bird death article at LAT has 2 important quotes. One is that over 400,000 birds are killed by windfarms each year. The other quotes a windfarm lobbying group that well, so what, cats kill birds and other stuff kill birds.

This is hilarious. We shut down drilling over some obscure lizard, devastate logging over an owl, stop coal mining over some clam or something I can't even remember, ExxonMobil faces huge damages over 70 dead birds, etc but windfarm deaths don't matter.
#10 parentofed on 2011-08-04 01:27 (Reply)
I don't live in Rwanda, I live in America, and in America I'm poor. It's a matter of context. There are things I need to save up for, and at the moment I find myself behind in my saving. Which means I have to do without things you can obtain without worrying about it.

Having clinical depression and Aspergers doesn't help matters any. Indeed, the two together make saving for necessities harder than they would otherwise be.
#11 Alan Kellogg (Link) on 2011-08-04 02:47 (Reply)
"World War 2 is over: Germany wins."

And they learned to do it the nice way, without violence. They won fair and square by being pacifists. Let's put them in charge of everything.
#12 ErisGuy on 2011-08-05 06:11 (Reply)

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