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.
"The song's lyrics describe the title establishment as a luxury resort where 'you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.'On the surface, the song tells the tale of a weary traveler who becomes trapped in a nightmarish luxury hotel that at first appeared inviting and tempting."
When I was a boy, the populations of New York and California were about equal.The taxpayer and sane-unfriendly policies of New York led to its decline, as people flocked to the Golden State, California’s population now more than double New York’s.Now, the gold is severely tarnished. The supposedly “something for nothing” policies that pander to the poorer, illegal immigrants, the S.F and L.A. liberal elites, envirocrazies, and unions, all at the expense of taxpayers and business, has led to an exodus of born Americans and industry to other states.Like New York, California is near bankrupt and its dominant power-brokers refuse to wake up.
California voters just roundly rejected the Democrat-Schwarzenegger phony fixes.So, now, as reportedfrom Sacramento, there’s a standoff in which the Democrats continue to peddle phony fixes.Schwarzenegger seems to be refinding some sobriety, but as Sacramento’s top columnist narrates,the gimmicks are a joke.
"And the key thing," Schwarzenegger said, "is now to just really make sure they don't come up with one-time solutions, because even if you go and withhold your taxes, it's a one-time solution. Or if you go and move the date of paying your paychecks from June 30th to July 1st, to kick it over to the next fiscal year, that's a one-time solution. It doesn't help you in the out years."
A smart-aleck journalist – this one, in fact – quickly reminded the governor that his budget also contains "one-time solutions," such as forcing taxpayers to speed up payments to the state.
"Absolutely correct," the governor conceded. "And what we don't want to do is add to those."
"So it's all right if you do it but not all right if they do it?" yours truly persisted.
Democrats rant against California Prop 13, that limits property taxes, and the 2/3rds rule in the legislature, that limits Democrat majorities.San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper editorial board member Chris Reed, sets them straight: California property taxes since 1980have “gone up 84 percent faster than combined inflation and population growth;” without the 2/3rds ruleCalifornia would “see an enormous range of tax hikes -- not budget restraint or cuts -- whenever deficits emerged,” as in New York.The New York Times describes the many instances of unions, aside from using their power over the California and New York legislatures to protect their profligate benefits, using their political power to self-servingly increase the costs of “green” power.
Former NYC Mayor Rudolph Guiliani op-eds in today's New York Times that New York needs a 2/3rds rule, like California’s.
SUPERMAJORITY FOR TAX INCREASES Too often increasing taxes is the first impulse for Albany legislators. Requiring a supermajority for tax increases would provide a powerful check on those who still think we can tax and spend our way out of economic problems. A supermajority would protect already over-burdened citizens and attract businesses, improving our long-term competitiveness.
Hmmm!A 2/3rds rule for Congress, House and Senate, wouldn’t eliminate budget battles but might slow down the fast-Barack haste to tax and spend the rest of America into California and New York’s bankruptcy.
N. Korea threatens to wipe the US off the earth. I wonder whether the O is one of those kind of guys who can be tough on the basketball court (eg basketball, the Brits, the Repubs, etc), but who wimps out with genuine danger.
I guess we need to try being nicer to the North Koreans. Have we tried sending flowers, or inviting them over for hot dogs on the 4th?
Have we tried destroying our economy, or castrating our military? Have we tried bending way over yet?
Semi-related re our hot dog party friends: Iran is erupting. Shucks, let's invite them all over to our house. Maybe if we are nice, they will be nice.
I spent my young youth on Cape Cod, while my Dad was stationed at Camp Edwards. (1st. Lieut., US Army. Drafted out of Harvard College and never went back but, along with his fellow draftees, he was granted alumnus status and afterwards went on to grad school at the great University of Chicago, then, after a stint at the also great University of Rochester, to Yale to teach in a scientific field.)
Readers know that the salty air, the fog and the foghorns, the frigid water, the mud flats, and the clam broth seeped deep into my soul and, despite all of the development and the ticky-tacky that happened up there in the past 30 years, it's still my soul's home base. I can put up with some ticky-tacky, if it's American.
Sipp on Cape Cod (he still lives near there). Here's one of my recent Wellfleet photos. Always buy the Toro (Bluefin Tuna fatty belly meat, and grill flaming hot 3 minutes per side). As you can see in the photo, they cannot spell their own name; that's a Striper eating a lobster (as they love to do); and Cape Cod is not for the fancy set, the Country Club set, the Hamptons set, or even the Nantucket set (or, when it is, they would never let it show: that is the Yankee rules):
Fielding has issued a challenge to the Obama White House to rebut the data. It will be a novel experience for them, as Fielding is an engineer and has an Australian's disregard for self-important government officials. Here is how The Agedescribed his challenge:
Senator Fielding emailed graphs that claim the globe had not warmed for a decade to Joseph Aldy, US President Barack Obama's special assistant on energy and the environment, after a meeting on Thursday…. Senator Fielding said he found that Dr. Aldy and other Obama administration officials were not interested in discussing the legitimacy of climate science.
Telling an Australian you're not interested in the legitimacy of your position is a red rag to a bull. So here is what Fielding concluded:
Until recently I, like most Australians, simply accepted without question the notion that global warming was a result of increased carbon emissions. However, after speaking to a cross-section of noted scientists, including Ian Plimer, a professor at the University of Adelaide and author of Heaven and Earth, I quickly began to understand that the science on this issue was by no means conclusive….
As a federal senator, I would be derelict in my duty to the Australian people if I did not even consider whether or not the scientific assumptions underpinning this debate were in fact correct.
What Fielding's questioning represents is just the tip of the kangaroo's tail. He speaks for a growing number of Australians who will no longer take green propaganda on trust.
Read the whole thing. The magnitude of the hoax is finally coming clear to the general public. It's about time.
The CDS --the "toxic assets" that AIG (most prominently) committed ritual suicide with --was specifically left unregulated by this guy in the yr 2000 financial reforms, when there were a few hundred million in CDS existent. By 2007, that number was sixty trillion. Denninger makes the case that complex structured assets are deceptive by design.
Waxman-Markey would be a very stupid bill even if it were true that 1) the earth is getting warmer, 2) human activity is mostly responsible for climate changes, and 3) a warmer earth would be a bad thing. Given that all three of these premises are false--we cannot, in fact, control the weather--Waxman-Markey is a suicidal monument to human folly.
Oh, it seems easy at first. The press is kind; the Congress is pliant; the country loves you. You’re a breath of fresh air after the previous administration’s excesses. Your first attempts at big-ticket legislation shoulder their way into law. The opposition party looks easily divided, easily co-opted and deeply out of touch.
But eventually the hard part arrives. For Barack Obama, it may have started last week, courtesy of the abacus-wielding wonks at the Congressional Budget Office.
Dick Morris' new book Catastrophe. Yes, he is a Dem.
Where did the US sit in 2007 (the last year of data in Table 1315)? Somewhat less socialist than the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) average, but well into the mix. In 2007, government spending in the US was 37.4% of GDP, or more than Australia, Ireland, Japan, Slovakia, South Korea and Switzerland. The OECD average was 40.4% and the European average was 46.2%.
In 2007, the federal government spent "only" 20% of GDP (the remaining 17.4% of GDP was spent by state and local governments). According to the Congressional Budget Office, President Obama will spend 28.5% of GDP in 2009. If states and localities have remained roughly constant, government spending is now about 46% of GDP, or almost exactly the European average in 2007.
We are as much in the thick of socialism right now as, say, Germany, Greece and the Netherlands.
But the trends in these figures tell an even more interesting story. Table 1315 lists 28 OECD countries. At some point prior to 2007, 16 of those governments were spending over 50% of GDP. The European average peaked in 1993 at 52.2%. But by 2007, only four governments spent over half of GDP: Hungary, Denmark, Sweden and France. The European average fell from 52.2% to 46.2%.
At one point, Sweden was the top socialist in the OECD states, at 70.9% of GDP. But by 2007, France was in the lead, at just 52.4%. Sweden's government had cut its spending by almost 20% of GDP between 1993 and 2007. That is the size of the entire US federal government as a fraction of GDP!
The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll appears more honest in demographics and political leanings of respondents than the one with slanted political-affiliation respondents that the New York Times-CBS tried to slip past us over the weekend.Simply, there’s justified concern over the costs of healthcare but more concern over losing the healthcare we now have or the government dictating it.President Obama remains popular, but his policy is bad medicine.
As this poll sums up:
A majority of Americans see government action as critical to controlling runaway health-care costs, but there is broad public anxiety about the potential impact of reform legislation and conflicting views about the types of fixes being proposed on Capitol Hill… Most respondents are "very concerned" that health-care reform would lead to higher costs, lower quality, fewer choices, a bigger deficit, diminished insurance coverage and more government bureaucracy. About six in 10 are at least somewhat worried about all of these factors, underscoring the challenges for lawmakers as they attempt to restructure the nation's $2.3 trillion health-care system.
Part of the reason so many are nervous about future changes is a fear they may lose what they currently have. More than eight in 10 said they are satisfied with the quality of care they now receive and relatively content with their own current expenses, and worry about future rising costs cuts across party lines and is amplified in the weak economy….
Beyond general backing for governmental action, a few specific provisions under consideration on Capitol Hill receive significant levels of public support, including higher taxes on households with incomes above $250,000, a limit on medical malpractice amounts and, under certain conditions, a law requiring all Americans to carry health insurance. A large majority, 70 percent, opposes a new federal tax on employer-paid health insurance benefits that exceed $17,000 a year.
Majority support for certain new government action, however, does not come with high hopes: Half of all Americans said they think the quality of their health care will stay about the same if the system changes, and 31 percent expect it to deteriorate.
The poll data is available here. Here’s part of the data below:
When I was a boy, my father would pile me in the Hudson and drive around the country. He'd been a tool and die maker since WWII, machining the precision equipment that produced America's plenty. We'd stop at factories and ask for a tour, which the men who labored there were all too pleased to provide. Ah, memories.
Last Sunday, the boys and I spent a wonderful day at the Antique Gas & Steam Engine Museum in Vista, CA, north San Diego County. (Website www.agsem.com) On 50-acres are gathered the restored and waiting to be restored machines that powered America becoming the breadbasket that fed its other workers and the world.
The boys' fun began before we left the driveway. Captured, bagged and moved to our more rural destination.
Here's a field of oldies.
A highlight was the hour-long parade of machines. A steamroller leads the way.
That's a tractor pulling a bailer.
The Clampetts were there, too.
Jason stands by as a seasoned former farmer and mechanic instructs Gavin in how to run this old wood burning steamer.
For reference to size of this fuel-burning baby, Jason is almost 5' tall.
Jason instructs Gavin in the finer points of this replacement for pulling a plow.
The boys got to ride all over the 50-acres on a 1940's Farmall like this one.
There was stuff for the ladies to do, like these early clothes washing machines.
This one brought back memories, tractor mobile USMC artillery.
And the visit ended with the most scrumptious home-made peach pie, a la mode of course, served up by farm ladies, who gave seconds to the boys.
A wonderful Fathers Day, and memorable to the boys.
In our therapeutic culture, where all is tolerated but the good, the assertion that there are consequences for our behavior, either temporal, or especially eternal, is a truly noxious notion. The idea of Hell is perceived as an anachronistic anathema, promoted cynically by clergy controlling the poor, ignorant fools who follow them. Even those with a nominal belief in a deity will attest, with a pretense more wishful than wise, that a God of love would never condemn those who reject Him to Hell. In some sense–surely not that which the proponents of such pop theology intend–this may well be true. It will be, for those who enter that dark, hopeless, and agonizing eternity, not something dictated from on high by a vengeful God gleeful at our torture. It will be our own choice, fully, to reject the mercy and grace which has been offered to us without cost by Him who gave everything to draw us toward an eternal relationship, filled with unspeakable joy and peace, with Him.
Many of us stayed up late to watch the Tonight Show.Johnny Carson’s multi-decade sidekick, Ed McMahon has passed away at 86.
Stars and Stripesreminds us of an earlier, and better, time: Col. McMahon, USMC (Ret.), like many Hollywood celebrities of his era, was a military veteran. He volunteered for service during World War II. He went through flight training at various bases, but the end of the war came before he was deployed overseas.
In the 1950s, McMahon was recalled by the Marines to serve in Korea. There, he was an F-9 Panther pilot and flew 85 combat missions as an artillery spotter, according to an Army website….
In the 21st Century, the everyman-celebrity continued to participate in military ceremonial events, including an appearance in 2003 (above) with then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Peter Pace, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Korean armistice, and a 2006 Valentine's Day concert event for the troops taped at the Pentagon.
The living connections to the golden era of Hollywood stars who served in World War II is quickly coming to a close….
For you young whippersnappers, this may seem as old as the pyramids, but so many movie stars - like so many Americans, in general - wore the uniform when the entire country was called to duty for World War II. Andrea Shea King’s 2007 interview with Ed McMahon is up at Big Hollywood.
“The California Air National Guard named me a Brigadier General, an honorary position, but in the Marine Corps, I got to be a full bird, what they call a full bird, a colonel. And I’m very proud of that, and I’m very proud of my career in the Marines. I had six years, two wars, 85 combat missions, so I’m very proud of that.”
“It’s not the same, no it’s not. It’s unfortunate.You know, in World War Two, even in Korea, everyone was kind of involved. They called Korea the ‘forgotten war’ but still, everybody had someone, a cousin or somebody that was in the war, and in World War Two, everybody was in the war — the Gold Star mothers, you know, everybody was involved. We had certain restrictions and rules we had to abide by and it was a different situation.
“Unfortunately now, it’s tumbled into a thing almost like Vietnam again where these boys coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan — they should be honored as well and it disappoints me that they’re not.”
Good night, Ed.We won’t forget to pay honor.
For those too young to remember why we stayed up so late, the tomahawk story gives you a glimpse.
The Jewish-born Roman Catholic convert Czech composer Viktor Ullmann's Der Kaiser Von Atlantiswas his last composition in the Terezin concentration camp outside Prague before he was shipped to Auschwitz in 1944 and gassed on arrival.
One of the remarkable stories of the era is about all of the music in the camps, and Terezin had more than its share of talent. The Nazis and even the SS loved music and thus encouraged camp musicianship. Mrs. BD recently heard a Terezin survivor speak about being in the choir there at age 11. (140,000 passed through Terezin: 20,000 were liberated at the end.)
In this short (50+ min.) modernist opera, the Emperor of Atlantis (a thinly-disguised Hitler-type) declares total war on the world. (As one would expect from a prison camp opera, the "Loudspeaker" has a major role and, instruments being limited, it's like a cabaret band.) Death goes on strike out of resentment at the competition from the Emperor, but love reappears on the battlefield and, in the end, Death is persuaded to resume his merciful task of erasing pain from the world when the emperor himself agrees to die.
Here's a snippet of the opera on YouTube, the Emperor's farewell aria:
GOT THOUGHTS ON THE HEALTHCARE PROPOSAL? Call your Senators and Congressperson. (202) 224-3121, or — better — call the local office in your town. Complaining on the Internet isn’t enough . . . .
The main reason Americans spend more on medical care is not about life expectancy - it's about two simple things: quality of life, and the trial lawyers.
(American life expectancy stats are also pulled down by the numbers of premies and babies with terrible abnormalities we attempt to save.)
First, in how many countries can you get a shoulder repair or a new knee or hip in a week? Annual screening colonoscopies and mammographies? Guys with advanced ALS on home ventilators? And how many countries generate the new treatments that the US does? (We do 90% of them. For a recent dramatic example, see this via Insty.) We all wear out and die, but there aren't many countries where my 83 year-old Mom would be playing tennis with her new shoulder, hips and knee, her synthetic mitral heart valve, her pacemaker, her cataract surgeries and her hormone replacement. She calls herself The Bionic Mom. She is willing to die, but while she is alive she wants to live: play tennis, work in her gardens, go to the ballet, sit on her volunteer boards, cook for my Dad, and go to Europe every August. What is that worth in $ terms? Of course they are on Medicare, but they would gladly buy private insurance instead.
Re the trial lawyers, where else in the world do you get a $7000 work-up if you walk into the ER with a migraine headache? Where else in the world do obstetricians pay $350,000/year in malpractice insurance because the law permits suits for bad results, not just practice errors (like amputating the wrong leg)?
If something needs fixing, it's the latter, not the former.
The president characteristically denies that he is doing what he is doing — putting the nation on a path to an outcome he considers desirable — just as he denies any intention of running General Motors. Nevertheless, the unifying constant of his domestic policies — their connecting thread — is that they advance the Democrats’ dependency agenda. The party of government aims to make Americans more equal by making them equally dependent on government for more and more things.
The main question of the day is, can Americans afford NOT to adopt socialized healthcare? Everyone knows that the individual will never take the necessary steps; it is up to the State to do it for us. In a vital decision like this, do we really need to depend on the vote of emotionally underdeveloped conservative segments? Those incapable or unwilling to acknowledge the moral superiority and the ethical progress of the more socially advanced Europeans, do not deserve a right to vote. Voting rights shall be taken away from them, as well as their medicine. One cannot expect a society to prolong the lives of its useless, degraded elements at its own peril.
I need to squeeze in here somewhere the fact that members of Congress and the government would keep their own generous private medical plans, and not be subject to government control.
Because of the deadweight costs of taxation itself, costs that are not included in the propaganda we are increasingly being fed, we might well find that there is in fact, overall, no saving of money.
President George W. Bush concocted the connection between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein to justify the Iraq invasion. Now President Barack Obama is concocting an equally fantastical theory to justify a de facto government takeover of health care.
Ms. Feinberg recalled one 15-year-old boy from Long Island who told her: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ”
"World cooling is here to stay and the new round of climate alarmism just announced by UK Government ministers and the Met Office of more extreme weather and warming in coming decades driven by mankind has no merit and is defied by the facts and front-line science”, said Piers as his forecast from three weeks ahead was confirmed for the formation of the first East Pacific typhoon of the season off Mexico.
What most Americans identify as government "welfare" are payments to single mothers, food stamps and (perhaps) Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor. But that's not the half of it. Since 1960, government has changed radically. Then, 52 percent of federal spending went for defense, 26 percent for "payments for individuals" -- the welfare state. By 2008, 61 percent consisted of "payments for individuals," 21 percent for defense.
Social Security and Medicare -- programs for the elderly -- represented the lion's share: $1 trillion in 2008. Most Americans don't consider these programs "welfare," but they are. Benefits are paid mainly by present taxes; there's little "saving" for future benefits; Congress can alter benefits whenever it wants. If that's not welfare, what would be?
Pressures on private and public welfare won't abate.
This is what Tait Trussell of the Acton Institute wrote in an article just last week:
“[I]n just three years from now, Social Security and Medicare will need one out of ten tax dollars, John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis points out. And just 11 years in the future—by 2020—Uncle Sam will need one out of every four income tax dollars to fund these programs for seniors. If we continue with all other government programs in operation today and raise the taxes to pay for Medicare, plus Medicaid—the health program for low-income folks—the Congressional Budget Office estimates a middle-income family by the middle of this century will have to pay two-thirds of its total income in federal taxes.”
This situation defines the term “unsustainable.” Why is not President Obama proposing a “fix” to avert this approaching catastrophe? Curiously enough, not only he is unconcerned, but he seems to think that the unviable entitlements constitute some sort of achievement. This is what he said about them in Chicago:
Presidents have called for health care reform for nearly a century…But while significant individual reforms have been made – such as Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program – efforts at comprehensive reform that covers everyone and brings down costs have largely failed.
The president apparently believes that these failing federal programs already represent reform and that all that is needed now is to create something that would quickly become the mother of all entitlements – governmentally guaranteed universal healthcare.
Americans should really worry when their president fails to recognize the real dilemma we face as a nation: Either we reform entitlements or we let them drag us down the dark pit of insolvency.
I majored in Statistics in college (with a minor in English Lit), but my stats sophistication is a bit rusty now. But it's not so rusty that I do not raise my brow at any latest stats reported in medicine, or especially in Psychiatry - and especially genetic studies.
As Gene Expressions points out, it's partly because a p-value of 0.05, commonly used in such studies, is unrealistic for these things. It's straight out of How to Lie with Statistics, which is essential reading for all high school students.
For nearly all diseases, reproducible associations have small effect size and are only detectable when one has sample sizes in the thousands or tens of thousands (for many psychiatric phenotypes, even studies with these sample sizes don't seem to find much). The vast majority of candidate gene association studies had sample sizes in the low hundreds, and thus had essentially zero power to detect the true associations. By the argument above, in this situation the probability that a "significant" association is real approaches zero. The problem with candidate gene association studies is not that they were only targeting candidate genes, per se, but rather that they tended to have small sample sizes and were woefully underpowered to detect true associations.
While I find the field of behavioral genetics to be as fascinating as anything else in this world, I always read the latest gene-behavior studies with the highest skepticism. (Do I think real Bipolar Disorder has some provable genetic underpinning? Yes, I do, even though I do not think it has been adequately proven yet. But not much else genetic in Psychiatry has been adequately proven in my view. Schizophrenia maybe, IQ almost certainly, but possibly not homosexuality, or depression, or alcoholism.
The trick to getting papers published is to run your numbers so they show something. It's not rocket science if you know how to do it: just look at the climate studies. (Even Einstein fudged his math. He happened to turn out to be right, though, as far as we know today.) Science is about hypotheses, not Truth.
A lunchtime tune from from Levon Helm's new record. It has some of the old Band sound. Pure, cheerful, Christian, sentimental Americana. The guy can play anything, but he loves his drums - and he thought he was a lousy singer even before his throat cancer.
They've been lying about the number of people without health care. They've been lying about whether the public is satisfied with health care. They've been lying about every aspect of health care.
They unleashed the slip-and-fall lawyers on the medical system, causing untold higher costs for medical practitioners. They've attacked the health care system relentlessly, driving up costs just like they've attacked the energy industry and the automakers.
And even when they have complete monopolistic control of a system, like the educational system in America, they want more control. It's never enough. They want more money, more regulations. More. They need to "invest". They need to raise taxes. They need to repress. They need to compel.
Because the Statist cannot make the imperfect perfect, even though he says he can. The Statist is more imperfect than anyone else.
Related: Labour is like our Dems: their perennial strategy is to make as many as possible dependent on the government. That way, they hope to have jobs and power forever. Via TimesOnline:
Labour lags behind on almost every indicator, save one: it is still regarded as the party more likely to protect public services. An Guardian/ICM poll last week revealed that 48% of voters think Labour will protect services, whereas 46% think the Conservatives will do the same. Labour has a positive score of 1%, ie, more people believe Labour will protect services than harm them. The Tories have a deficit of 3%.
An architect of new Labour whispers in my ear, and Gordon’s, that people do not yet have full confidence in the Tories. The position of Cameron is much better than that of his party; the opposition’s lead is shallow. “If you do not trust them on the public services,” he says, “it’s a reflection of a deeper distrust that they have not really changed.”
I have tried pointing Americans at the British example to show them what an appalling idea it is to have the state directing any industry, let alone medical care. But alas it is very hard to overcome that special kind of insular American optimism that does not think what happens in another advanced first world nation can teach them anything, because in the USA things will be different.
DON SURBER: Don’t Become West Virginia. “If poverty is so good, then why do we have anti-poverty programs? Using her logic, we should have pro-poverty programs.” Well, that’s pretty much what’s going on right now . . . .
We said we would not make fun of Michelle O's garden, but this is ridiculous. Didn't they just plant the seeds a few weeks ago? I want to know what magic fertilizer they use. Potemkin garden? Or is this a loaves and fishes deal?
The Madame Hardy Rose, a Damask Rose, was bred by Alexandre Hardy in 1832.
My brother in CT emailed the photo with this note: "You gave this plant to me 15 years ago, and it's still doing well. I have never had a rose survive this long."
Being a father is an awesome calling and responsibility. Granted, just about anyone can father a child, but what an awesome calling and responsibility it is to be a father. At 64, I’m still learning, even though both our daughters have long flown the nest, are married and have put Anna and me squarely in the grandparenting stage of life, something we thought old people did. A lot of who I am today and how I act, as a parent and as an individual, can be attributed to my dad’s influence. Among those things I learned at my father’s knee: to be honest and reliable in daily dealings and to give the other person the benefit of the doubt - until he or she proves unworthy of trust; to be on time and don’t make others wait; to devote oneself fully to an honest day’s work; to make church a priority; to know how to have fun; to be there for your kids; to be an encourager; to say “please,” “thank you” and “I love you” often; to know when to say “no” and don’t jump too quickly on the bandwagon; to not wait for a funeral to give someone flowers; to set goals and persevere to meet them.
"The song's lyrics describe the title establishment as a luxury resort where 'you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.'
N. Korea threatens to 
Who says there's no free lunch? 
Many of us stayed up late to watch the Tonight Show.
Enjoyably humorous 
