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 history of humanity is a history of social networking all the same, according to Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, authors of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. “Our connections affect every aspect of our daily lives,” they write.
Some Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee were taken aback Wednesday by Attorney General Eric Holder's refusal to reveal conflicts of interest involving Justice Department lawyers who, before joining the Obama administration, worked on behalf of Guatanamo detainees.
It goes against against my instinct, judgement, taste, and sense of proportion to do a Christmas post before Thanksgiving, but I couldn't resist this bizarro Dylan offering. (All money from Dylan's Christmas record goes to charity.)
Remain strange and unpredictable, Bob. We like you that way. This is a good Minnesota Polka:
Sarah seems to be a subject of great fascination. She was charming, smart, and funny on Hannity last night. Yes, her political points were shallow - but more substantial than "hopey-changey," and she has had more experience than he had - both in life and in government.
Here's her book tour schedule. Alas, nothing in New England. She should go to Boston.
The AP supposedly hired 11 fact-checkers to discredit Ms. Palin’s memoir (Did Fox News hire 11 to question the very questionable things found in the two Obama memoirs?)
(I wondered, as did Jammy, whether the AP will assign as many to studying the details of he health care bill: "Considering the AP assigned 11 "fact-checkers" to pore over Sarah Palin's 415-page book, I figure they'll assign a proportional amount to this, right? That would be 55 of them, assuming they're interested.")
If you believe, as I do, that the GOP once again needs to become the “party of ideas” — as it did under Ronald Reagan — then Palin is not the solution to what ails it. At this stage, based on the interviews I have seen with her, she doesn’t seem able to articulate the case for conservatism in a manner that is compelling or even particularly persuasive. She is nothing like, to take three individuals I would hold up as public models, Margaret Thatcher, William Bennett, and Antonin Scalia — people brimming with ideas, knowledgeable and formidable, intellectually well-grounded, and impossible to dismiss.
True, but those folks are not American politicians -
Finally, a word from our commenter MM on our Palin-mania post yesterday:
Sarah is doing a lot of things right. Holding true to her principles in spite of the ugly backbiting of the liberal media, remaining a faithful wife to Todd and a good mother to their children -- these are admirable things. Since I come from 'flyover country' myself, I have learned to discount what the limousine liberals have to say about most things and people. They view the world through a skewed lens of anger and resentment. But I still haven't figured out why they reveal their worst and ugliest selves whenever Sarah Palin is mentioned or comes on the scene. As a New England based commenter said on Neptunus lex the other evening, by all rights, by all they say they believe in, feminists ought to love her. She got her college degree, she married her high school sweetheart, she has five children, and she has been a successful governor of the largest state in the Union, and got a more than 60% approval rating from her constituents..
What's not to like? Of course, she has had more real world experience in managing effectively a large complex enterprise, meeting payrolls, and solving problems by concentrated effort. But what's so bad about that? Ohh, right. I forgot. Our present President hasn't done any of that. No governing ... no meeting payrolls ... no solving difficult diplomatic problems.
I guess you just have to hate a woman [or a man] who can do all of the above, successfully.
Or maybe it's just because she's beautiful. And her husband adores her. And encourages her in her achievements. Yeah ... that's probably it.
‘I love the tea party movement,’ she said. ‘It’s beautiful, it’s healthy. It’s part of that good healthy competition that’s needed in a political party.’ She contrasted the somewhat tumultuous state of the GOP to what’s going on in the Democratic party today. ‘It seems like the Democratic party is filled with more sheep-like individuals, who go along and get along,’ she said.”
The health-care mess grows worse: The Chinese have caught on that Obama wants to borrow more billions for us, who are cash
poor, to create entitlements that they, who are cash rich, would not
create for their own people. The new government suggestion that women
not begin receiving routine mammograms until age 50 comes at a bad
time, given that critics of Obamacare have been arguing that it will
lead to rationing of service.
Americans who are troubled by the decision to send alleged Sept. 11
mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York for trial will feel
better about it when he's put to death, President Barack Obama said
Tuesday.
I said good-bye to a fellow I have worked with on and off for over 15 years yesterday.
His wife died last winter, and he has finally decided to move to Florida to live with one of his daughter's families. Lonely. He is in his 80s. Most of his old pals in town that he worked with, grew up with, and worshipped with are dead. A sad farewell for both of us. He gave me a big bear hug. He was never a regular psychotherapy patient, but an irregularly-regular patient when things got tough.
Strong guys are not afraid of getting help when they need it.
I nursed him through panic attacks (cured them easily with medicine), a major depression after his heart attack, a major depression after the death of his wife, the suicide of one of his daughters. In the process, I learned a lot about his life. A lot about life. It is my privilege to learn a lot about life through people's lives. Their stories enrich mine.
Today, he reminisced about his troop ship trip home from England after having been a tail-gunner - a teenager - for a couple of years in WW2 in Italy and France, and finally in Germany. He was based in Dijon for a while. "We got the news about FDR's death on the ship. Some liked him, some hated him, but he was our boss. Ship was half-filled with guys like me headed for furlough, and half-full of POWs. Why, at that point in the war, they were bringing German POWs to the US I have no idea, but the military never makes sense. That's a given when you're in the service. For my furlough, they took me from New York to Massachusetts to Miami to New Jersey before I could get home to Massachusetts. After my month furlough in the local pub, I had to spend three months down in New Jersey to get enough points to qualify for discharge."
"Doing what?" I asked. "Basically, nothing," he said. "They just had to make us wait out our time. The action then was mopping up in the Pacific." He said "It feels so long ago now that it's like another life."
He is a retired mailman who remembers horse-drawn fire trucks, played trumpet in the Volunteer Fire Department marching band for 50 years, and still sings in his RC choir and delivers food to the elderly. "I'm older than most of the people I deliver to." He was the guy who told me that flak on an airplane sounds like "a bucket of gravel being dumped on the fuselage. You get used to it after a while. We all assumed we would die, and got used to that too."
An American fellow to the bone, and one of the finest, humblest, most giving and unselfish people I have ever known. He dedicated his life, and especially his retirement, to being a good companion and to doing unto others in whatever ways he could.
She's a pheenom. She's a non-elite, non-Hollywood celeb. She is beautiful, fertile, and athletic. Her hard-working, macho hubbie supports whatever she wants to do. The MSM hates her.
She's a yokel with common sense. Like Truman, Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson.
Even if you do not want her to be President, it is difficult not to like her.
...the majority of our representatives may congratulate themselves on reducing the number of uninsured, while quietly understanding this can only be the first step of a multiyear process to more drastically change the organization and funding of health care in America. I have met many people for whom this strategy is conscious and explicit.
We should not be making public policy in such a crucial area by keeping the electorate ignorant of the actual road ahead.
Readers know that I am opposed to death taxes - estate taxes. The wealthy find ways around them (how long has it been since a Kennedy or a Rockefeller held a real job as opposed to an optional job?), but merchants, the middle class, and farmers get screwed by them.
My friend in southern CT recently told me about a third-generation (the grandpa was an Italian immigrant) family-owned flower shop in their town which had to close up shop last month when Mom died. Why? They had to sell their small building to pay the estate taxes. Like a family farm, that is generations of dedication, good will, hard work, and a long-established part of a community down the drain.
Furthermore, I like the idea of middle-class families being able to build wealth over generations - and most people who work hard like that too. People like to feel that they are building something for the family's future, and for their family's independence from the kindness of strangers - and the government.
I do advise everyone, even if not wealthy, to do the best that they can to avoid the crushing effects of death taxes by getting the best estate-planning advice you can afford.
Brit Ted Dalrymple takes on the Fabians on the topic, in Let Them Inherit Debt. One quote:
There are many unfairnesses in life that we must learn to put up with, if we are to have any chance of happiness or even of tolerable contentment. For example, I should like to be taller, better-looking and more intelligent and gifted than I am. Every time I meet someone better-looking than I, taller than I, or more talented than I, which I do very regularly, I experience a brief spark of envy. What did they do to be as they are, my superiors? Why did providence, or chance, endow them with characteristics so much more attractive than my own? Needless to say, I never stop to think that, just possibly, some people might ask the same of me when they meet me.
But the differential endowments of nature are unfair, not unjust, because (at least as yet) no human intervention can prevent them. The inheritance of wealth is not like this: it is a human arrangement that could be abrogated if not easily, for political reasons, at least with some effort. And if injustice is unfairness brought about by human means, then inheritance of wealth is unjust. Ergo, inheritance of wealth ought to be forbidden because it is unjust, and we must always seek justice.
The question, then, is whether we should always seek justice to the exclusion of other desiderata. Is it true that justice always and everywhere trumps other considerations? I think the answer is no.
Jim O'Hara is a member of EAA chapter 493 in San Angelo. He is a retired college professor (I believe in Aeronautical Engineering) who learned to fly when he was about 60 years old. He's now 81 years old. 15 years ago, he began construction of a 2/3 scale P-38. Using information he obtained from various sources about the P-38, he drew up a set of plans using a computer aided design program. Jim and his wife Mitzi built the entire aircraft by themselves. I've been fortunate enough to know Jim for almost the entire 15 years that he's been working on his "project." He first flew his plane in July of last year, and has just completed flying off the time (I believe it was 50 hours). He designed the plane to have a small jump seat behind the pilot for his wife. She's tiny, and it's a good thing; the jump seat doesn't have much room.
He made his first cross-country with Mitzi from San Angelo to Fredericksburg Saturday, accompanied by many of his friends from Chapter 493.
What is the goal of the so-called conservative Democrats? We can infer from Charlie that it is merely to escape the wrath of the voters back home.
Pelosi & Emanuel allow a carefully deduced number of Democratic Members from conservative districts to be untouched because, you see, that serves their ultimate goal — pass a suicidal healthcare bill as they earlier passed a job-killing cap & trade bill out of the House.
Our ongoing occasional series from Capt. Tom on his home town -
Samuel McClellan House
Built in 1736, the McClellan House is an example of an early American large farm home. Located across from the S. Woodstock Commons and Codfish Flats (Codfish Flats was an area where farm hands lived in homes provided by wealthy farmers). Its basic structure has remained unchanged since 1736 with the exception of electricity and modern appliances. The roof is still cedar shingles and the frame is post and beam style with massive chestnut beams. The colors are original and were researched extensively by the current owner prior to painting.
Samuel McClellan was a Revolutionary War hero. McClellan raised one of the first Horse Calvary units of the war from Woodstock and the surrounding area. He purchased this home sometime after the French-Indian War - historians believe in 1763.
One point of interest: this home has several examples of Louis XV furniture built into the walls of the home - two dressers and one writing desk.
Editor's comment: I would speculate that the 1736 house is the part on the right, facing the road, and that the later addition off the rear, typical of New England, was cleverly integrated to enhance the original dwelling.
A propos our earlier post today about Immune from Logic, here's what they are doing in the UK: Health and safety snoops to enter family homes. Why people would put up with that is beyond me. Oh, I forgot. It's for the Greater Good. Meaning the good of the government.
It makes sense, however, in a sick sort of way: who pays the piper calls the tune. The more government controls the funding of medical care, the sooner they control what we do in our lives. Thus we get to things like this: A cost-benefit analysis of abortion vs. live birth.
Abortions are cheaper, of course. As Chicago Boyz says,
It’s as if we in the U.S. are moving toward a system where just about anything
can be justified because some government official says that it should
be so. It’s all for the greater good, right? What are pesky little
things like individuals and predictable rules in the face of all that
wonderful greater goodness?
Our universe is only 14 billion years old, in human time. Is our universe just part of a larger system? One dimension of a Multiverse?
Something Wonderful at Vanderleun. Listen to the video with Caltech's Sean Carroll, which only requires intro Physics. Science fiction come to life. It does put life in perspective.
One quote from Carroll re entropy:
"Every time you put milk into your coffee and watch it mix and
realize that you can't unmix that milk from your coffee, you are
learning something profound about the Big Bang, about conditions in the
very, very early universe. This is just a giant clue that the real
universe has given to us to how the fundamental laws of physics work.
We don't yet know how to put that clue to work. We don't know the
answer to the who done it, who is the guilty party, why the universe is
like that."
The social psychology 
Sarah seems to be a subject of great fascination. She was charming, smart, and funny on Hannity last night. Yes, her political points were shallow - but more substantial than "hopey-changey," and she has had more experience than he had - both in life and in government.
Hard words from VDH: 
She's a pheenom. She's a non-elite, non-Hollywood celeb. She is beautiful, fertile, and athletic. Her hard-working, macho hubbie supports whatever she wants to do. The MSM hates her. 
Non-elites: 
Our universe is only 14 billion years old, in human time. Is our universe just part of a larger system? One dimension of a Multiverse?