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.
Except for the twitterings of some migrating warblers and thrushes, the morning bird chorus here has suddenly gone silent.
That's because the local breeders have now laid their eggs, and no longer want to draw attention to their presence with their territorial calls. 21 days for a bird egg to hatch, and then comes the long hassle of feeding, protecting, worrying over, and keeping track of the bird babies.
We wish these folks luck "working together" with the Obama auto-design team. One thing seems certain by 2016: Taxpayers will be paying Detroit to make the cars Americans don't want, and then they will pay again either through (trust us) a gas tax or with a purchase subsidy. Even the French must think we're nuts.
Would somebody please explain to me how electric cars reduce fossil fuel use? Since, thanks to the enviro-nazis who block nuclear power, our electricity comes mostly from coal...
MIT: We're all gonna die. Despite 10 years of global cooling, computers insist on apocalypse. Doesn't direct observation trump computer modeling? I guess not. How come nobody is paranoid about Hal living in those MIT computers?
I entirely agree with this. A quote from Herbert Meyer at Am Thinker:
When politics in a democracy is normal, the political parties all agree to preserve the operating system while they compete to improve it. This is what is actually happening when one party in Congress introduces a new piece of healthcare or education legislation and the other party opposes it or introduces its own healthcare or education bill, or when two candidates for the Senate argue over whether or not to change our immigration laws. Honorable people often will disagree about what to do -- sometimes quite strongly, just as the software engineers at Microsoft and Apple will sometimes argue through the night about whether a proposed change in the operating system's code is an improvement or just "kludge." But in normal politics the outer limits of all these disagreements are marked by a shared commitment to preserving and improving the operating system.
In abnormal politics, the objective of one party isn't to improve the operating system, but to overthrow it.
With this analogy in mind, now we can see clearly what's been happening in the United States during the last three decades. While conservatives have been working to improve our democracy and our free-market economy, liberals have been working to replace our democracy with a dictatorship, and our free-market economy with a command economy controlled by the government. The liberals couldn't say this aloud, because if they did the American people would have tossed them out of office on their ears. So the liberals worked covertly, feigning support for democracy and for the free market while working diligently to undermine both.
This is why our politics has been so partisan, so vicious, and so deadlocked. This is why words have lost their meaning in Washington, why we can never get to the bottom of anything, why we lurch from one manufactured scandal to another. It's all been part of a decades-long effort by the liberals to throw sand in our eyes -- to keep us from seeing clearly where they really want to take us.
Recall that during the Asian financial crisis the United States and other Western countries demanded that the Asians take three steps – let bad banks fail, keep spending under control, and keep interest rates high. In its own crisis, the West has done exactly the opposite on all three fronts.” Here Zakaria brilliantly exposes our unwillingness to face the music. We think somehow that we are the exception to the rule. This is because our collective character has been spoiled. It has long been my contention, that because we are “spoiled,” our culture has become a process of leveling as described in Søren Kierkegaard’s essay “The Present Age.”
The spoiled adult, like the spoiled child, doesn’t want to do the right thing. Furthermore, he hates his better, revolts against authority, and embraces the path of self-destruction. He doesn’t want the rules applied to him.
Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.
(Related, via Politico: "a recent CBS News poll show(ed) 72% of Republicans worried over the growth of government as opposed to 58% of Democrats who want more of it." What sort of red-blooded American would want "more government"?)
The people spoke: California must cut budget. Schwartzenegger went to DC to say "We need help." Help yourself, tough guy. Don't be a pussy-man. From the link:
Schwarzenegger joined with liberal Democrats and the California Teachers Assn., the group that helped defeat a 2005 ballot package championed by the governor. Foes of Proposition 1A, meanwhile, included several unions, which didn't like the effect spending limits could have on the state workers they represent, and anti-tax groups that hated its extension of tax increases.
Gummint to hand GM to the unions. Brilliant. That means the gummint forced me to buy GM debt - something I never would have done. Thanks, geniuses. And yes, I do know that it's a political union pay-off. Chevy, I hardly knew ye. Chevy - and GM - is DOA.
In a recent interview with Trina Hoaks, the atheist blogger for the Examiner.com website, Dawkins described religious believers as follows: “They feel uneducated, which they are; often rather stupid, which they are; inferior, which they are; and paranoid about pointy-headed intellectuals from the East Coast looking down on them, which, with some justification, they do.”
Yep, that pretty much sums me up. How did he know me that well?
The new garden path that I mentioned on the Spring to-do list. Besides looking nice, it solved the problem of the previously muddy route that the dog always takes on his routine patrols for enemies and intruders. Fortunately, he likes the new path. No, I did not build it myself but I could have, given the time.
The Mrs. did a nice job with her new semi-shade border, but it will take a year or three to mature. As you can see, I pruned the heck out of that young Crepe Myrtle behind the hybrid Rhodies. Maybe too much. That's a small Kousa Dogwood on the corner.
It is truly a conspiracy to keep them poor and stupid.
There are a number of sites to visit to keep up with the totalitarian joke of a tin-pot dictatorship that Venezuela is turning into, but we still rely mainly on Venezuela News and Views. He retains some sense of humor about it all, despite the unfolding tragedy of a once-fine and hopeful nation.
It's a damn shame to watch them head down the Zimbabwean path to disaster while Fidel, Hollywood, and Ahmadinejad cheer Chavez on.
Congress, ever more a re-election committee for incumbents of all parties rather than a legislature, has shown scant relish for either cutting spending or raising taxes on the middle class, both of which create instant voter resentment. So it is likely to borrow still more in the bond market.
Of course one way for a government to get out from under an unsupportable debt load is to inflate its way out of it. The national debt is dollar-denominated, so a raging inflation would make it worth less as a percentage of GDP. In the inflation-ravaged 1970’s, the national debt nearly tripled in dollar terms (from $370 billion to $909 billion) but it fell as a percentage of GDP from 39 percent to 34 percent.
The Federal Reserve’s number-one job is to maintain price stability. If the Fed — despite what will be enormous pressure from politicians desperate to avoid having to take responsibility for their folly — does that job, I don’t think the present debt course will be sustainable.
How that will play out is anyone’s guess, but it will be ugly, to put it mildly.
Pking gets it right. “To torpedo faith is to destroy the roots of . . . any system of knowledge . . . I challenge anyone to construct an argument proving reason’s legitimacy without presupposing it . . . Faith is the base, completely unavoidable. Get used to it. It’s the human condition.” (All of us, not just believers, see through a glass darkly.) Religious thought may be vulnerable on any number of fronts, but it is not vulnerable to the criticism that in contrast to scientific or empirical thought, it rests on mere faith.
The Obama administration’s agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of “economic planning” and “social justice” that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail.
The administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.
There’s a new gang in town. They’re not trying to act tough. They don’t have to. They’ve already proven they are. They’re not trying to look tough. They look like your neighbors. They’re not teenagers. They have become worthy adults by passing difficult hurdles.
But, they do have colors. They’re red, white and blue.
The new gang is called the Warrior Legacy Foundation. The warriors are not just military veterans but anyone who reveres the contributions and sacrifices of veterans, and wants to see their commitment honored and passed on to coming generations, whether serving in the military or not.
The binding commitment is to the military code of conduct: “I will never forget that I am an American, fighting for freedom, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my country free.”
As one of the founders remarks, “Veterans make the community in which they live a better place.” That community ranges from their block to the world. Think for a moment about how your community would be lacking if not for veterans.
To me, what makes a warrior, in any walk of life, is the willingness to give 110%, more than they themselves thought they were capable of, donating comforts not for glory but for being the best and furthering the betterment of others. Those are the traits that distinguish a worthy life and neighbor and citizen.
The Warrior Legacy Foundation is not out to make claims for government benefits. It is focused on raising the profile of the warrior class as a guide to what we all need to be and raise our children to be. Go to the above link and sign up to be part of this important mission. Be a neighbor and not just a bystander.
“We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word many mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name — liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names — liberty and tyranny.”
Abraham Lincoln, Baltimore, MD, 1864 (h/t, And rightly So)
You have nowhere to go, and nowhere to be, and after the second time you take them your sailing companions must lose the urge to talk about the process of sailing in an enthusiastic fashion and simply enjoy it, and the company. And with the sky arrayed overhead, and the sea below, you are content to examine the world dispassionately. And the beauty and simplicity of the clouds that drift, the terns that swoop, the wavelets that tap their gentle knuckles on the windward side, the feeling of motion snatched without struggle from the endless breezes that massage your cheek and sail alike allow you to enjoy the world and all its wonders, and everybody in it, if just for a moment.
You're never going to understand the contemporary fringe left until you understand what happened to Oliver Cromwell.
Maureen Dowd got caught plagiarizing a blogger in her New York Times column the other day. But calling the lockstep mindset she's channeling "plagiarism" is superfluous. She's cribbing the homework of someone who writes something called Talking Points Memo, after all. They can all finish one another's sentences, or start them to get the ball rolling. Makes no never mind. They never have an original thought, just endless permutations of the same drivel about George W. Bush.
They all think if they rearrange the words a little one more time, George Bush will be guilty and Karl Rove will be arrested or Alberto Gonzales won't be able to rent movies from Netflix or... something. Or maybe they'll all be tried in absentia in some weird traffic court based in a European country whose GDP is less than Al Gore's electric bill, and George will be forever unable to travel to some frosty HMO masquerading as a country to pick up the Nobel prize they'll never award him anyway. It seems like trying to invest heavily in tulip bulb futures at this point to any sane observer. George wasn't running in the last election; he's very, very unlikely to stand in the next one. But still they persist.
If you are a monomaniac, you try to convert others to your mania. Smart people give you the cold shoulder immediately. If you listen a little, you're going to have to listen a lot. It's the reason you don't make eye contact with people yelling at traffic in the street. It doesn't pay to seem interested and polite.
A nice email from a friend who came from Russia with his family to work in the US:
Special thanks for the introduction of the Maggie’s Farm. I don’t go to bed unless I read something there. I hope that you are going to survive the Bolsheviks intervention in this country.
The weakness of all Utopias is this: that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motorcar or balloon.
G.K. Chesterton, via Dr. Bob who has a piece up, Epiphany of Evil, inspired by Roger Simon's postings.
Why is everybody 
I entirely agree with this. A quote from Herbert Meyer 
Pay your credit card on time - 
There’s a new gang in town. They’re not trying to act tough. They don’t have to. They’ve already proven they are. They’re not trying to look tough. They look like your neighbors. They’re not teenagers. They have become worthy adults by passing difficult hurdles.
You're never going to understand the contemporary fringe left until you understand what happened to Oliver Cromwell. 
The 
