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.
Three executives convicted under anti-trust law were sitting at the same table in the prison cafeteria. The first said, "I charged more than others and was convicted of price-gouging."
The second said, "I charged less than others and was convicted of predatory pricing."
The third said, "I charged exactly the same as everyone else and was convicted of collusion!"
"If things really suck in America as bad as Obama and Hillary say, then how come everybody in the world who wants freedom and opportunity will do anything to come here?"
That is Mark Levin's correct quote, I think, as I heard it on the radio. We are the world's freedom and opportunity destination. If you want other things, you can go elsewhere - or stay where you are.
Our friend and guest author Dr. Mercury told us how to create links readers can click without losing the page at Maggie's - so you can left-click links now.
The little things in life make a difference. In fact, 99% of life is one little thing after another.
For the first time this Spring, the bird song chorus this morning at dawn had the volume turned all the way up, despite below-freezing temps. It always sounds new to me.
...John McCain is in very good shape for the general election run. The Republicans have landed on the one candidate in their party ideally suited for the race this year, with broad appeal among Democrats and independents, a veteran and war hero during a time of war, a candidate with a reputation for being a straight talker (and not talking down to voters, or outright lying to them), and with real strength in larger swing states. McCain is also benefiting from the fact that the Democrats continue to snipe at each other rather than at him, and each candidate has exposed weaknesses in the other, which become ammunition for McCain in the fall campaign.
McCain opens up the map to a broader Electoral College victory than George Bush achieved in 2000 and 2004, particularly against Barack Obama.
Indeed it do. It's the new ad phrase written on Dunkin' Donuts cups, and it's just one of those things that distinguishes America from the rest of the world.
Everybody at Maggie's is a gun-totin' Bible-thumpin' redneck hick who wants more from the government. More Coors Lite would be a good place to start. Later, we'll be needing the Chateau Margaux to accompany our government brie, but all Opie wants is free Grey Goose.
...now Hillary reinvents herself as a gun-totin' churchgoer.Heck, everybody brings a gun to church, don't they? It's the bitterness, ya know? I always bring spare ammo, just in case.
If you have a lawn and want some ideas, please read the B's Got Grass? The money quote:
Landscape design is a psycho-spiritual enterprise.
Finally, if you missed Dr. Mercury's first of his series here on computer tips, check his piece on Search Engine Tips. I did learn some useful things.
Our blog pal Theo sent me this image re Obama as an impostor but, in fact, he is not. Obama gets in trouble whenever he says what he thinks - and either he or his wife do it all the time. They don't hide it.
Do they think we all live in Berkeley or Cambridge among the bien pensant brie-eaters? (Disclaimer: I am known to eat brie.) Hillary is too "smart" and too lacking in conscience to make these sorts of errors of honesty.
I think the story is that Obama's words have some legs because they expose the old story of the Left's condescension towards, and sense of superiority in relation to, regular folks. Rush has always contended that the Left refuses to run on their real beliefs, and I think that is true. Truth is, the hard working folks of America are doing fine as long as they live within their means. They have many concerns and interests beyond their bank accounts and whatever freebies they could be entitled to.
And Americans are not babies: they neither long for a government mommy nor do they take politicians' promises or pandering seriously. They are used to government taking their earnings and offering little in return. Mostly, they want the nanny government to leave them the heck alone. They are, in fact, thinking, responsible, hard-working adults. I know lots of "them," including myself.
As Mark Levin always says (approx.), "If things are as terrible and hopeless in America as Hillary and Obama say they are, then how come every ambitious and freedom-seeking person in the world wants to come here to pursue their dreams?"
Obama's political problem is that he is not enough of an impostor to fool the savvy American middle class.
Ketchup-lovers like me hate the idea of enriching the wannabe-patricians Theresa Heinz and John Kerry. Plus we like the idea of something with a bit more kick. I am making this one, from the Food Network:
3 tablespoons oil 1/4 cup diced red onion Can of Roma tomatoes, skinned, cut into 1/4-inch pieces 1 tablespoon chopped garlic 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar 2 tablespoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh dill Salt and freshly ground black pepper Pinch allspice Pinch celery salt Pinch mustard seed
In medium saute pan over medium heat, add oil and onions. Cook until brown and caramelized. Add the tomatoes, and garlic and cook for a few minutes, just to soften the vegetables. Then add the remaining ingredients and simmer for 30 minutes.
You can either serve the ketchup chunky or puree it in a blender first and serve it smooth.
At least double the vinegar, in my opinion. If grilling burgers for guests, offer the bottle and the home-made. See which one they prefer.
Most of our lives are guided by gut feelings (aka "unconscious thought") and not by deliberate logical heuristics: just consider merging onto a highway, making friends, picking a mate, tennis, or shooting - or consider how Spaniels catch frisbees or how Labs mark the distant fall of a Canvasback. Our brains can do Multivariate Calculus even if we got a B in Trig, confuse left with right, and were dropped on our heads by our Moms.
Those of us who know the flaws of our mental autopilot systems have to compensate by deliberate thought. That means work.
Gert Gigerenzer is good, and his speech here is relevant to law, investing, medicine, sports, and to life in general. "Knowing" too much can sometimes be a handicap (and we all know how much "data" can be wrong). It's a bit long for our ADD readers (over 1 hr), but it is a paean to the brilliance of the irrationally rational intuitive human brain and a credit to Gigerenzer's logical mind, and well worth the time:
The West reveals . . . a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; the West . . . no longer loves itself; in its own history, it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure.”
Pope Benedict XVl, as quoted by Anchoress. We'd like to offer Benedict a hearty welcome to the USA - and we advise him not to park that Popemobile in a No Parking Zone in NYC - the cops will tow it... well, maybe they won't: they are still mostly Irish.
If we are striving to bring people together — and I believe we should be — I don't think it helps to divide our country into one America that is enlightened and one that is not.
Pot, kettle. However, now Hillary reinvents herself as a gun-totin' churchgoer. Heck, everybody brings a gun to church, don't they? It's the bitterness, ya know? I always bring spare ammo, just in case my bitterness builds up.
Learned something useful about web searches from Dr. Mercury's post: using a - sign to rule out irrelevant searches.
Photo: Our Forsythia is coming into bloom. The big fat tree is a Copper Beech.
42They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. 44All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. 46Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
From an essay by Richard Wolin in Chronicle of Higher Ed, titled Jurgen Habermas and Post Secular Societies. It begins:
Among 19th-century thinkers it was an uncontestable commonplace that religion's cultural centrality was a thing of the past. For Georg Hegel, following in the footsteps of the Enlightenment, religion had been surpassed by reason's superior conceptual precision. In The Essence of Christianity (1841), Ludwig Feuerbach depicted the relationship between man and divinity as a zero-sum game. In his view, the stress on godliness merely detracted from the sublimity of human ends. In one of his youthful writings, Karl Marx, Feuerbach's most influential disciple, famously dismissed religion as "the opium of the people." Its abolition, Marx believed, was a sine qua non for human betterment. Friedrich Nietzsche got to the heart of the matter by having his literary alter ego, the brooding prophet Zarathustra, brusquely declaim, "God is dead," thereby pithily summarizing what many educated Europeans were thinking but few had the courage actually to say. And who can forget Nietzsche's searing characterization of Christianity as a "slave morality," a plebeian belief system appropriate for timorous conformists but unsuited to the creation of a future race of domineering Übermenschen? True to character, the only representatives of Christianity Nietzsche saw fit to praise were those who could revel in a good auto-da-fé -- Inquisition stalwarts like Ignatius Loyola.
Twentieth-century characterizations of belief were hardly more generous. Here, one need look no further than the title of Freud's 1927 treatise on religion: The Future of an Illusion.
Today, however, there are omnipresent signs of a radical change in mentality.
Obama's elitism. Pajamas. Photo: Our effete Editor Bird Dog, who is not an Obama guy and who does not care for Chardonnay with the Big Macs on which he feeds. More on the topic via Insty here, and also here:
TOM MAGUIRE: A TYPICAL SORT OF FLARE-UP: "Hmm, how typical is it for a candidate to characterize a huge swath of his target voters as bigoted, gun waving religious fanatics?" And a big roundup from James Joyner, who observes: "Class bias works both ways. Urban elites tend to view rural America, especially Southerners, as a bunch of yahoos. Rural Americans, meanwhile, think big city types are elitist snobs who don’t love America. There are similar resentments between rich and poor, educated and not, and even Ivy League -State College. In private gatherings, where people think they are among the like-minded, one hears shocking bigotry along those lines."
And sometimes it's recorded and circulated on the Internet.
Everybody at Maggie's is a gun-totin' Bible-thumpin' redneck hick who needs more from the government. More Coors Lite would be a good place to start. Later, we'll be needing the Chateau Margaux to accompany our government brie. All Opie wants is Grey Goose.
• In the short-term, psychological denial can help a person maintain their sanity--which would be threatened by awareness of a painful truth or reality • In the short-term, denial can help a person function day to day • In the short-term, denial can prevent a person from having to acknowledge painful thoughts, feelings or behavior and help them maintain a world view threatened by an unacceptable reality or truth
(it's) actually the place for people who aren’t interested in news. And it’s pathetic in a time of war, and a time of great turbulence and great change, to switch on, and there’ll be the light item about the new fat pill, or whatever. I mean, it’s formulaic, it’s tired, it’s shallow, and it’s unwatchable.
This is a weekly Saturday morning feature that will slowly, over time, turn you into a full-fledged computer expert. More info here.
Lesson 1: Search Engine Tips
I'd thought we'd start off with something everyone uses at some point, the search engine. The biggest problem today is simply the vast number of sites out there. Search for six exclusive keywords and 1.2 million sites pop up. As such, the use of certain 'tricks' is getting more and more critical if you actually hope to find what you're looking for.
There are two different approaches one can take, and two different methods of attack, so let's cover those before getting to the individual tricks.
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Query for Barry: Are you, perhaps, referring the the Great Unwashed? Like me? To what should I cling, if not to guns and God? To you? And a comment: Unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled manufacturing jobs have been disappearing for far longer than 25 years. In our parts, they disappeared 50-80 years ago. Barry has a short time-frame. New England is filled with old mill towns and old empty factories with broken windows. Things change, and I thought you were in favor of change. Anyway, I know the economic facts don't matter: it's just routine pandering, because those old jobs are never coming back and people have to learn how to do things for which there is a labor market.
The first scene opens with the mob, the stage direction being ‘Enter a company of mutinous Citizens, with staves, clubs and other weapons.’ The First Citizen addresses the crowd: You know that Caius Marcius [Coriolanus] is chief enemy to the people. The crowd replies enthusiastically that they know it. Let us kill him [continues the First Citizen], and we’ll have corn at our own price.
This idea seems a very one to the mob, who agree with him: No more talking on’t! Let it be done! Then the First Citizen enunciates what might be called the first principle of socialist economics, upon which (implicitly, of course) Shakespeare pours scorn): What authority surfeits or would relieve us. If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely; but they think we are too dear. In other words, the fundamental problem of economics is one of distribution; and if it were sorted out, all would be well. The redistributionists have ye always with you.
Our friend and guest author Dr. Mercury told us how to create links readers can click without losing the page at Maggie's - so you can left-click links now.
For the first time this Spring, the bird song chorus this morning at dawn had the volume turned all the way up, despite below-freezing temps. It always sounds new to me.
"America runs on Dunkin'"
Our blog pal Theo sent me this image re Obama as an impostor but, in fact, he is not. Obama gets in trouble whenever he says what he thinks - and either he or his wife do it all the time. They don't hide it. 
What's the matter with Chicago? 
Obama's elitism. 
Lesson 1: Search Engine Tips