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.
It must be midwinter, because we have been posting so many New York City items. Much more than usual. Hunting season is over, Spring is far off, we don't all ski, and we all like to ingest some culcha on weekends. Where else can you find more and better of everything, without having to spend a lot of money (except for parking)?
The federal district court in Pensacola, FL ruled today the entire ObamaCare bill is unconstitutional. The case was brought by 26 states and the major group representing small business.
Their plead had two parts: 1) The mandate to require purchase of medical insurance exceeds the federal government’s authority under the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause of the US Constitition; and 2) The imposition of additional Medicaid costs upon the states violates the 10th Amedment to the Constitution.
The court ruled against the second pleading, as – impractical as it may be – the states could refuse to participate in Medicaid.Actually, in reaction to the increasing costs of Medicaid, many states are already, instead, paring back on Medicaid benefits they themselves have added onto the base required by the federal government.
The judge, however, did rule that the mandate is inextricably wound up with the complex interdependencies of ObamaCare and cannot be severed. Thus, the entire ObamaCare is ruled unconstitutional.(See my earlier post about the Virginia federal district court ruling that the mandate is unconstitutional but can be severed, and the rest of ObamaCare stand.) But, pending appeals, the Florida judge will allow ObamaCare to stay in effect.
The Republican leader in the US Senate, Mitch McConnell – an able practitioner of Senate rules – says he will use the Senate Rule 14 to force a vote in the Senate on the repeal bill passed by an overwhelming majority of the House.It would be a surprise if he can muster 60-votes, but it will force the Democrat Senators to each be on record.
The US Supreme Court is unlikely to rule for another year or two. In the meantime, however, the Obama administration will continue to issue regulations, and the insurance markets will continue to comply and adjust, making it more difficult to excise ObamaCare’s effects.
Some Democrat Senators are floating ideas to neutralize the mandate issue by other means of impelling purchase of medical insurance. Why didn’t they float and support these last year, one may ask.It will take more than these ideas to right what’s wrong with ObamaCare.I floated some in my Op-Ed in the San Diego Union-Tribune ("No GOP Ideas? Try These 10") last year during the Congressional debates. Surely the Republicans in the House and Senate can even do better than I.They better. Reform is needed in some areas, and the better ideas wouldn’t throw out the baby with the washwater as the Democrats did in federalizing control of virtually all aspects of our medical care by throwing out free choice and the freer market.
What that "dysfunction" seems to mean is that one is a lousy boss of oneself. A useful concept, I think. People who achieve their goals make rational, practical plans, follow their plans, and are good at taking orders from themselves. When they tell themelves they are going to do it, they do it.
If Plan A doesn't work, they already have Plan B waiting in the drawer.
I think people vary enormously in their executive functioning.
If the weather permits me to get to Ohio for a quick visit this weekend, I will of course try to stop by my favorite 24-hr WalMart in Mt. Vernon. Who knows, might run into Mr. Hardin in a leopard skin suit.
But what to wear? Does everybody at WalMart look unusual? Is this "fashion-forward"? I wonder what Janet Napolitano wears when she goes. Dressing subversively for WalMart is a challenging task for uninventive folks like me. (h/t, Moonbattery):
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
The same thing that is the matter with most of the modern Middle East: in the post-industrial world, its hundreds of millions now are vicariously exposed to the affluence and freedom of the West via satellite television, cell phones, the Internet, DVDs, and social networks.
And they become angry that, in contrast to what they see and hear from abroad, their own lives are unusually miserable in the most elemental sense.
BASIC "female" skills are becoming endangered with fewer young women able to iron a shirt, cook a roast chicken or hem a skirt.
Just as more modern men are unable to complete traditional male tasks, new research shows Generation Y women can't do the chores their mothers and grandmothers did daily, reported The Courier-Mail.
Went to a very enjoyable and festive Chinese New Year party last night. It's the Year of the Bunny Rabbit, I was told.
The special cocktail of the evening was the Lychee Martini. I don't think I had ever had a Lychee before, much less a Lychee Martini. Delicious and refreshing.
Lychees are tasty fruits, flavor somewhere between a pear and a grape.
"I don't understand it. I don't like it. And I don't think anyone would think differently. There's nothing you're trying to say that hasn't been said before you. And everyone who's said it before you has said it better than you have."
That was part of the critique the pupette got on her recent college poetry writing course effort. I guess everything is supposed to be new, despite what Ecclesiastes teaches us. She has always been told in the past that she is a talented writer. She did say "I'd like to point out, however, that this professor is phenomenal."
I emailed back something like this:
"That's what we are paying them for - tough criticism, high demands, and a dose of humility. If you could meet their demands already, what would be the point of being there and paying them money? My best teachers ripped me to shreds. They want to stretch you to your max and beyond it to find your limits, and that is good. We can't all be TS Eliots, and few youths have enough life under their belts to write poems that are more than pretty strings of words anyway. Don't worry - you have your friends and family to love you regardless."
Last week I sent her a poem that my brain wrote during a dream. (I never sit down to write a poem, but sometimes they come to me so I try to put them on paper before they disappear. Generally, I only share them with my sis who is a published poet.) I thought this one might have been about my college pup, or maybe any one of my kids, and did not add the title until I guessed what it could be about. I would not want to show it to a Prof.
Child
First you jumped out of my hand, hid in the sand camouflaged by the sand. Then I caught you with two hands but with a laugh you jumped out again into the water where the sea had carved a deeper channel. The water was clear. You dissolved in the water. I dove in to search but I could not find you.
Later, you returned from a foreign shore tall, and painted blue, asking what we do next.
Some friends in the know told me last night that I might think I am going to North Africa this summer - but that I'm not. Lucianne's headline: U.S. Embassy tells Americans they should consider leaving Egypt as soon as possible because of unrest, violence and ongoing demonstrations. An estimated 55,000 Americans are currently in Egypt. Flights scheduled for Monday
Our mens' study and prayer group is doing Ecclesiastes right now. As we are all more or less middle-aged, we can all relate to this poetic "wisdom book."
Ecclesiastes 1
1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. 2 “ Vanityof vanities,” says the Preacher; “ Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” 3 What profit has a man from all his labor In which he toils under the sun? 4One generation passes away, and another generation comes; But the earth abides forever. 5 The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, And hastens to the place where it arose. 6 The wind goes toward the south, And turns around to the north; The wind whirls about continually, And comes again on its circuit. 7 All the rivers run into the sea, Yet the sea is not full; To the place from which the rivers come, There they return again. 8 All things are full of labor; Man cannot express it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, Nor the ear filled with hearing. 9 That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, And there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there anything of which it may be said,
“See, this is new”? It has already been in ancient times before us. 11There is no remembrance of former things, Nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come By those who will come after.
Denigrating Chinese maritime prowess is a longstanding habit in the US naval establishment. Officers and analysts reared during the Cold War found it hard to shed the image of China's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) as a backward force composed of patrol boats, short-range fighters, and small submarines that hugged the coast.
Perception chronically lagged reality even after the turn of the century, when the PLAN started introducing a panoply of high-tech warships, aircraft, and antiship missiles.
Mostly, those gloomy Swedes are crazy-depressed, Moslem-loving, atheistic drunk and sex-addicted Socialists who hate hard or unpleasant work, but they got this one thing right.
In response to this topsy-turvy world, the traditional media, tenured professors, well-paid public employees, rigid ethnic and racial lobbies, unions, organized retirees, open-borders advocates and entrenched politicians all are understandably claiming that we live in an uncivil age.
We well may, but we also are seeing the waning of an old established order. And the resulting furor suggests that the old beneficiaries are not going quietly into that good night.
When a child, certain skies sharpened my vision: all their characters were reflected in my face. The Phenomena were roused - At present, the eternal inflection of moments and the infinity of mathematics drives me through this world where I meet with every civil honor, respected by strange children and prodigious affections - I dream of a War of right and of might, of unlooked-for logic. It is as simple as a musical phrase.
(from Illuminations. Sadly, one must be careful about posting poetry in translation - publishers own the copyrights, so you just have to buy the books. Two Rimbaud websites, here and here.)
A big snow is a delight to every Yankee who has a camera. Big snow makes everything new. An ordinary snowfall is not as inspiring. Here's the road I live on:
Just kidding re the above. My friend Nathan sent this pic of Central Park yesterday. I'd guess that was his Leica, not his cell phone:
NYC is a wonderland in a good snow. Our buddy Kab sent these to me from NYC too:
A relative sent in this pic of his house in CT. That's a typical, in-town New England house. It provides shelter. Your heart and soul provide the charm and warmth:
Those of you spending tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for your children’s college education, and paying taxes to support colleges, may be interested in a current brouhaha at my alma mater, Brooklyn College.
A doctoral student, 1 ½ years into his studies, was hired by the Political Science department to teach a graduate level course on the Politics of the Middle East. I wrote about his clear and one-sided pro-Palestinian writings and radical associations, and of his slanted syllabus of readings. Subsequently, others wrote to the college administration questioning this hire, including the New York State Assemblyman for the adjoining district. The hire was rescinded, the formal reason given that the hire was insufficiently credentialed.
Predictably, the hire complains that academic freedom has been trampled. Some on campus and the hire’s ideological friends in the blogosphere agree. The NYC press has covered the incident, repeating their charges. The hire himself appears in a TV report saying, “I have very vocal views in favor of the Palestinian cause for self-determination.” At his personal website, the hire says, “Unfortunately, due to external pressure, the Brooklyn College provost has chosen to suppress academic freedom and intervened to cancel my appointment. This is a profoundly unsettling outcome and I am currently challenging it.”
Au contraire writes a retired professor at the college to the Chancellor of the City University of New York:
By now serious academics realize that the propagandists work deliberately to confuse "academic freedom" with freedom of speech per se.Academic freedom is the freedom to teach and write within the constraints and standards of one's discipline, which means paying methodic attention to the relevant sources and domains under a course heading.This is the freedom that needs defending, and has been commendably defended in this instance.
Further, it does not appear this hire has any legal grounds to demand he be hired.
So, what is at stake: academic freedom or academic license, especially when abused, completely inviolate from legitimate concerns of students, parents, or knowledgeable critics?
The hire at Brooklyn College was, most charitably, a mistake, now corrected.
No surprise there. Those students don't know grammar either. What do they know? I hope they know quadratic equations. I hope they read the Constitution - but you don't need a school to do that.
Well, they certainly know what Howard Zinn thinks - I mean, thought. They aren't necessarily lazy and dumb, they just aren't cut out for the really demanding mental stuff. What they need is solid basic knowledge, learn a job, maybe make a family, and they'll be just fine and as happy as they want to be. How many really smart kids do we need?
Science and math require more disciplined, rigorous, and abstract thinking than most kids want to bother with or, perhaps, are capable of. If a kid says languages - or math, or chem - are "too hard," you know right off that they lack the serious horsepower even if they are "bright and articulate." Most kids like the soft stuff - if they like any of it at all. Trouble is, you don't need a school for the soft stuff: it's all available out there, for free. Everywhere, nowadays.
In our spoiled, decadent culture, most people seem happy to pay others do the heavy mental lifting while they benefit from it all at ridiculously low cost. I know, because I am one of them, although I did plenty of math and hard science in college.
It has always been my contention that nobody should be able to earn a college degree without at least a year of calc, and real college chem, physics, and Bio (also, Econ). Otherwise, however bright you may be, you can't call yourself eddicated because there is too much basic stuff in life you don't understand well enough to have a legitimate opinion about.
Maybe I should have said a High School degree instead of College. If a kid had my kind of High School degree, they would be in a position to learn everything else they were interested in or needed to know on their own, in the library, or from The Teaching Company, or on the job. (Wisdom, on the other hand, comes from getting out there and living and getting into the cage with the Beast of Reality, and taking the knocks and dealing with the BS.)
High Schools should have oral exams on simple basic facts, because kids aren't ready for wisdom. "What's a subordinate clause?" "What's Avogadro's number?" "What's iambic pentameter?" "Why was Alexander Hamilton important?" "Why was Alexander the Great important?" "How does a lever work?" "Why do we care about the Phoenicians?" "How do you find the volume of a cone?" "How does an airfoil work?" Etc. Send in examining teams to do the testing to see whether a High School degree is justified. Paper testing doesn't do it. Nowadays, there are kids graduating from High School who cannot answer those questions.
It's the elite few who design our software, who design and build our computers and X-boxes and cars and refrigerators and airplanes and bridges and office buildings and coffee pots and power plants and missiles and digital cameras and machine tools and oil refineries and robots and hybrid wheat and permanent paintless house siding and our chairs and tables and new medicines and our Blackberries. Those are the unsung heroes of our daily lives.
It's all I can do to repair a horse fence or to replace a cracked windowpane in the barn, yet I am paid better than the people who design and build those useful things I listed above. Understand the workings on my motherboard? Not likely. Not smart enough, yet I am considered "highly educated."
My point is that the kids don't need to know the challenging stuff: Let them learn the elementary basic stuff, and the soft stuff if they want, and get their lightweight diplomas signifying that "they attended," and leave the challenging stuff to the smart, ambitious kids. Let the rest of us lazies flip burgers or teach school or attend meetings or sit in cubicles or express shallow and uninformed opinions about how life works, because we do not know how to make anything useful.
Let those few precious brainiacs work nights to make the tools and toys for us while we fart around with stuff that "interests us." The rest of us don't have to know anything complicated, do we?
Young Americans already face a future defined by an inescapable reckoning. They already tend to look at our grand entitlements as phantoms, as dead entitlements walking. They already know the problem isn't that we have too few college graduates, but that we -- like Tunisia and (gasp!) China, to mention a few -- have too many for the market to absorb.
Went to a very enjoyable and festive Chinese New Year party last night. It's the Year of the Bunny Rabbit, I was told. 
FOF: 
