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.
Is there any rational reason for High School to be four years?
Is there any rational reason for colleges to be four years?
Why not six years? Why not three? Why not make High School just end when you learn what they set out to teach you? Why doesn't every high school make up a list of educational goals which, when met, you're outta there?
When my Dad went to grammar school (and High School, too), they threw you out of there when they felt you knew enough. He went to college at 16, got drafted out at 18. The Army sent him to Basic, then sent him to grad school, and thus his career began.
Are manners all about social signaling? I don't think so. I find bad manners to be an aversive stimulus, and poor table manners cause me to lose my appetite. To term that a "signal" is to stretch the definition. Once a society agrees on manners, unmannerly behavior becomes offensive.
It's not rocket science. The basics, for kids:
Take your elbows off the table. Don’t talk with your mouth full. Don't pick up a fork until everyone is seated and the hostess picks up her fork. Eat slowly, and converse during meals. Look people in the eye when you speak to them. Avoid talking about yourself: Assume that only relatives and close friends care. Say "Please" and "Thank you," and say "How do you do?" when introduced to elders. Give a firm handshake. Write your thank-you notes in a timely fashion.
Increasingly, innovative companies are avoiding going public, and confining their capital-raising to the now vast private capital markets. This is not surprising; we have made it so unpleasant to be an executive of a public company that I do not know one who would not rather be private. Worse, the people who do succeed at public companies are experts in process and governance, and not very likely to make imaginative leaps or forge new businesses from the wreckage of the old.
...getting a grip on mass immigration would at least signal to existing foreign residents that the west has ceased to fetishize civilizational suicide as moral narcissism. For Sarkozy, Merkel and Cameron to give speeches arguing that their societies have failed to turn immigrants into citizens to a degree that threatens social cohesion while simultaneously leaving the doors wide open suggests a certain lack of seriousness.
...it’s one thing if teachers just want to be hard-core unionists, no different from the least pretentious laborers you can think of. It’s just the “for the children” stuff that’s so hard to swallow.
Obama is not “failing to lead” as some people are claiming. That is all wrong. All suggestions to that effect are all wrong. Obama knows exactly what he is doing.
Obama is setting up a confrontation and he plans to win.
Call it Chess, or call it Rope-a-Dope; it's a DC game but the MSM will never say so.
If I had to pick my favorite song by The Band, I think this would be it (or maybe Acadian Driftwood, or The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, or The Weight, or their version of Dylan's Tears of Rage, or I Shall Be Released) :
Maggie's doesn't have a 'Contact' page for a couple of reasons. For starters, most of the gang are working professionals and simply don't have the time to respond to individual inquiries. Then there's the hours needed to sweep out the stalls and slop the hogs that has to be accounted for. And, to be honest, we're kind of a laid-back bunch and aren't very concerned about typos and broken links and whatnot, which is really what a contact page is for. If all you want to do is mouth off about the article, that's why there's a comments section.
By the same token, we always appreciate suggestions for posts and links to interesting things, so we don't consider it 'off-topic' or 'threadjacking' to leave them in the comments.
Whose thread you leave it in would depend on the topic. If it's a newsy item, then the daily links would probably be the best spot. If it's a more worldly item, especially if it relates to the military, then Bruce is your guy. For cultural matters, such as education and the economy, I'd turn it over to Barrie. Dr. Bliss, our resident shrink, doesn't have the time to spend with comments, so don't bother there. Geek stuff and videos and such should be directed to me, Dr. Mercury.
As a small caveat, many times a blogger will glance over the comments ten or twenty minutes later, but then get busy and not check again. So if you leave a suggestion and it goes unanswered, it might just be the person never saw it. If it's actually important, leave it in one of my threads because I answer everybody. (I work at home so I have more time than they do)
In summation, none of the bloggers are going to complain if you jump into one of their posts with an off-topic link. Proper protocol merely dictates that you acknowledge your off-topicness with a quick "Pardon my being off-topic, but have you seen this amazing video?" or words to that effect, just to let people know.
Last Friday we had a guest post by Rug Rag about his frustrations with his internet marketing.
This week, I see at The Other McCain a post relevant to that one, titled Stupid Google Tricks:
“Being ranked in the top 5 for something on Google and being ranked 25th or 125th can be the difference between selling your crappy website to AOL for $315 million and going out of business.” – James Joyner, Outside the Beltway
Religious as well as non-sectarian writings all contain various prescriptions and injunctions related to their view of morality. Most Americans recognize the difference between individual morality and state morality, as exemplified in the two versions of the Golden Rule. Individual morality is violated when state morality is violated.
The prescriptive Golden Rule – rule for a better life by individuals and voluntary associations -- comes down to do to others what one would want done to oneself. The variation, the injunctive Golden Rule – the prohibition, not to do to others what one wouldn’t want done to oneself, is more limited and more applicable to manmade laws that have restraints upon the extent of state power.
When the latter, the injunctive Golden Rule, is violated by the state, there is an intrusion into the former, the prescriptive Golden Rule. To some or many affected, there is a denial of their individual moral rights. The state mandates behaviors that force individuals to act in ways that they would not want to be done to themselves.
The upholding of the injunctive Golden Rule is closest to our Constitution and to the philosophy of libertarianism.The violation of that injunction is closest to those philosophies or political movements, whether from the Left or Right, which seek to force their particular moral political agenda upon others.
Our Constitution works to restrain these violations.
The legal debate is moving through our courts over whether the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause of the Constitution allow the mandating of purchasing medical insurance. Advocates of the mandate argue for it as increasing the ability to obtain more affordable medical care by increasing the breadth of the insurance pool. Opponents challenge that affordability assertion due the impracticalities of creating such a broad pool without unacceptable draconian measures, and due to the sheer demand-cost inflation created for more medical services by many more. However, the Constitutional issue is whether the state can require activities, as compared to enjoin activities.
Those not at the poles – either libertarian or moralistic – are the majority of Americans. In most cases, once the poles have argued, and courageous individuals entered the fray to focus the discussion regardless of the heat from the poles, the majority of Americans do not so much compromise as recognize the necessary interaction between the prescriptive, individual Golden Rule and the injunctive, state Golden Rule.
End new entrants to Social Security, remove the medical subsidies and entitlements via a block-grant to the States and then phase them out over 5 years, the clean-sheet the tax code to get a single tax rate for all Americans, remove all deductions and benefits from the code, and proportionately reduce that under the poverty line so that each and every working American has a stake in the US government. In addition clean-sheet government starting with just the few functions of the Treasury, Mint, Commerce, Defense, Coast Guard, and any interstate laws not connected to a federal agency (such as kidnapping, wire fraud and such).
All other government agencies and quasi-government entities would be abolished, and the postal system put into a standards carrier system to which any carrier could apply for pick-up and delivery service so long as they abided by a system neutral concept for exchange of packages. We can pay for those already in Social Security through higher taxes, but Social Security, itself, must go as a concept. States are better able to gauge the need for their poor for health care, and by removing the cost overhead of the current system, prices across the board for health care will drop. State and local systems already duplicate many of the large scale systems at more sustainable and accountable levels and removing the duplicate work that is 'One Size Fits All, Fits None Well' from the federal side will allow for leaner and better crafted systems to take over at the State and local levels.
“The argument between assimilationists and multiculturalists is whether it is the immigrant or the culture that should change.”
I've always assumed that the reason at least half the world would like to live in the US is because of our culture. Who wants to change it? You don't see people climbing barbed wire fences and breaking laws to get into Russia or Egypt or Iran or India or China or Venezuela, etc. The most recent stats I saw (2000) showed 2.9 million people in NYC itself were foreign-born. That's mind-boggling, equivalent to the entire population of Kansas.
The passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Amendments led to a surge in immigration to New York City and a decline in the share of European immigrants. Between 1970 and 2000, the total foreign-born population nearly doubled, from 1.44 million to 2.87 million, while the share of Europeans dropped, from 64 percent to 19 percent. Latin America was the largest area of origin in 2000, accounting for nearly 32 percent of the city's foreign-born, followed by Asia (24 percent), the nonhispanic Caribbean (21 percent), Europe (19 percent), and Africa (3 percent). Thus, New York City's foreign-born in 2000 have extremely diverse origins, in contrast to the overwhelming European origin of the foreign-born in earlier decades.
Sometimes, listening to the MSM and the Left, you'd think that this country was a terrible place to live in. Ingrates, if you ask me. My foreign-born colleagues and acquaintances thank God every day that they are here in America - while people like me, it's shameful to admit, often just take it all for granted.
As fashionistas and celebrities pile into New York City this week for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, they might want to do a look over of their outfits before heading out. The reason? The fashion police just got themselves a brand new patrol car. Black and white, with sirens and yellow flashing lights, the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Force will be paroling the streets of New York City in their 2012 CLS63 AMG. Serious powerplant built and modified by AMG, the 518-horsepower engine about to do 0 to 62 mph in 4.4 seconds. Fast enough to stop anyone in the middle of a styling faux pas and nip any fashion disaster in the bud. Look for the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Force CLS63 AMG around your block this week.
Vietnam today has embraced the only way that exists to escape poverty, let alone to produce prosperity: capitalism and the free market. So what exactly did the 2 million Vietnamese who died in the Vietnam War die for?
It's a good piece, but minimizes what I think the war was really about: geopolitical maneuvering. Both North and South were proxies, if not pawns.
That's us and our proud staff. As Sipp would say, we are out standing in our field.
Point is, if you like our site, please let your friends, colleagues, neighbors, relatives, and enemies know about our eclectic (our euphemism for unfocused, random, shapeless) site.
How many sites have Assyrian carvings, Snow Geese pics from a goose blind, sauce recipes, Bible verse, Petrarch, Brooklyn College, The Grateful Dead, and political slapstick on the same front page at one time? Who can predict what you'll find here?
So show us the love. And if you have a site, and like us but rarely link us, let your readers know that we exist.
If our readership (much as we love our current readers) doesn't continue to grow steadily as it has thus far, we will move to Canadakill this cute puppyjump off a bridgequit taking our ADD medications be tempted to retire from this not-very-lucrative, if somewhat enjoyable and educational, endeavor.
Idle threat? God knows. We make this pathetic appeal twice yearly. There remain many billions of humans who haven't seen us yet, and, while we seem not to meet a mass market taste, I am certain that our market is not yet fully "exploited," as the marketing experts would say.
In the meantime, we Farmers will just...
Thanks in advance, friends, from your Editor in Chief, Bird Dog:
I need to say this – you shouldn't trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.
Official statistics indicate little inflation, and the Federal Reserve is eagerly trying to create more. However, the official rate of inflation is heavily weighted by items we already own that have fallen in price, like houses, and discretionary purchases, like furniture, appliances, electronics, autos and things you find at the going-out-of-business sales. But, the prices are rising -- often rapidly -- of most things you actually need to buy, food, gas, medicine and health care, education. That doesn't leave much dinero in most people's budgets to go out and buy a house, furnish it, replace the car, turn up the sounds. Except for the sounds of moaning at assurances and excuses by the Obama administration and its enablers.
To support the ancient history course we are doing with the Teaching Company, we had to go to the City to see some Assyrian stuff close-up.
Interestingly, there were Christian groups going through the ancient rooms with guides making all the relevant references to the Old Testament. Wonderful to overhear them. Ur of the Chaldees. Abraham. Captivity in Babylon.
These pics are actually Neo-Assyrian carvings from the acropolis at Nimrud, palace of Ashurnasipal ll, 880 BC. Note that one of the guardian gods or genies has hooved feet, the other lion's paws. They also have 5 legs, so that from the side they are walking, but from the front, standing firm. Cool.
Readers know my personal Museum Rule: Just go to see one group of things, and leave before becoming a victim of Museum Brain. An hour and 20 minutes is my limit.
Michael Milken warned us: 
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My morning links somehow all got hijacked by Iana - some site that sells domain names. First time that has ever happened. Will fix when I am able -
