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.
That explains it to me. It's the same reason the pols resist Costco in the big blue cities: unions vs. the citizens. Truth is, NYC needs WalMart much more than WalMart needs NYC. WalMart is doing just fine in the US and worldwide. These tough pols and union bosses are making fools of themselves and fools of the voters.
I have no WalMart in my area, but went to Costco this morning to get supplies for church coffee hour tomorrow (cheeses, strawberries, croissants, corn muffins, grapes, vegetables and veggie dip, bagels and cream cheese, etc), and remembered that Gwynnie had told me that they are now selling no-iron dress shirts that are as nice as the Brooks Brothers version at one-third the price. Despite being a loyal and life-long Brooks person, I bought one to try.
“We have an education system that is set up for the ease, comfort and security of those who operate it,” Christie said, urging his audience, many of whom may become leaders of schools, to be “disrupters.” He said they should disrupt “fat, rich and entitled unions” because that’s what’s needed to fix U.S. public schools.
“If you don’t do it we’ve got no hope,” the governor said. “If you’re unwilling to do it, we’re sunk, because you have less to lose than anybody. Take chances. Take a little risk.” Christie received a standing ovation.
Nothing less than a complete redefinition of the role of government away from the nanny state trend and back to a renewed era of personal responsibility is needed.
This repeated lunge for the sour spot — the place where costs are high and benefits are low — now seems to be a trademark of the President’s decision-making style. On the left it is earning him Carter comparisons from people like Eric Alterman; on the right it means that despite his compromises and yielding of significant ground he continues to feed the incandescent hostility of his bitterest foes. Worst of all, it suggests to people abroad and at home that the way to manipulate this “split the difference”, consensus-seeking President is to raise your demands. If you are going to get something like 50 percent of what you ask for, ask for twice as much as you really want. And with this Presidential style, the squeaking wheel gets the grease. Not surprisingly, all the wheels have begun to squeak.
Here is the paradox we face: The President is a consensus-seeker whose decision making style rewards polarization and a conciliator who loses friends without winning over enemies.
My friend says I was not a good son you understand I say yes I understand
he says I did not go to see my parents very often you know and I say yes I know
even when I was living in the same city he says maybe I would go there once a month or maybe even less I say oh yes
he says the last time I went to see my father I say the last time I saw my father
he says the last time I saw my father he was asking me about my life how I was making out and he went into the next room to get something to give me
oh I say feeling again the cold of my fathers hand the last time he says and my father turned in the doorway and saw me look at my wristwatch and he said you know I would like you to stay and talk with me
oh yes I say
but if you are busy he said I don't want you to feel that you have to just because I'm here
I say nothing
he says my father said maybe you have important work you are doing or maybe you should be seeing somebody I dont want to keep you
I look out the window my friend is older than I am he says and I told my father it was so and I got up and left him then you know
though there was nowhere I had to go and nothing I had to do
I can tell you that some certainly are, some could care less, and some find it an abomination.
Porn, recreational sex, prostitution, rape, illicit seduction, perversions, etc. have been going on since there have been humans. That's a fact. Humans are endowed with the wackiest sex drives and wackiest imaginations of all animals and, depending on conditions and circumstances, not always the most mature or honorable behavior.
But what about the ladies? A teen gal recently told me that somebody said to her, in the bathroom after a frat party, "I am so pissed that I didn't get any dick tonight." How times have changed. Or have they?
I suppose that the voyeuristic TV show Hoarders has raised the visibility of hoarding. It's one of those OCD-type of things that fades from totally insane to fairly normal.
If what you like to hoard is money, then you're just thrifty or stingy. If you like to hoard "collectible" items, then you're a collector: Art, rocks, knives, rugs, guns, pinball machines, etc.
If you can't get rid of stuff you don't really need to the point that it interferes with life, it gets to be a problem. Come to think of it, hoarding money can have the same effect.
I cannot embed this bit. If interested, there are more of these on YouTube - like this one: We can't have people over to our house:
Amusing. It's a good antidote to what Mark Steyn terms "the monarchical urge." I love it when Mark fills in for Rush. Mark cracks me up, constantly. Still, Brit traditions are wonderful.
If it’s good, the government should subsidize it. If it’s bad, the government should ban it. If outcomes are in any way perceived by any group to be sub-optimal, then the government should regulate it. Anyone who opposes these bans, subsidies, and regulations must therefore be a supporter of bad outcomes, hate poor people, want people to get sick and die, etc.
The charming myth was that Christ spent some of his missing years in England.
There seems to be nothing like a royal wedding to get the gals up at 3 AM to watch including my Mom and Mrs. BD. Sheesh. Cool hats though, I must admit.
A short time ago, Iran's Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged the Muslim World to boycott anything and everything that originates with the Jewish people.
In response, Meyer M. Treinkman, a pharmacist, out of the kindness of his heart, offered to assist them in their boycott as follows:
"Any Muslim who has Syphilis must not be cured by Salvarsan discovered by a Jew, Dr. Ehrlich. He should not even try to find out whether he has Syphilis, because the Wasserman Test is the discovery of a Jew. If a Muslim suspects that he has Gonorrhea, he must not seek diagnosis, because he will be using the method of a Jew named Neissner.
"A Muslim who has heart disease must not use Digitalis, a discovery by a Jew, Ludwig Traube.
Should he suffer with a toothache, he must not use Novocaine, a discovery of the Jews, Widal and Weil.
If a Muslim has Diabetes, he must not use Insulin, the result of research by Minkowsky, a Jew. If one has a headache, he must shun Pyramidon and Antypyrin, due to the Jews, Spiro and Ellege.
Muslims with convulsions must put up with them because it was a Jew, Oscar Leibreich, who proposed the use of Chloral Hydrate.
Arabs must do likewise with their psychic ailments because Freud, father of psychoanalysis, was a Jew.
Should a Muslim child get Diphtheria, he must refrain from the "Schick" reaction which was invented by the Jew, Bella Schick.
"Muslims should be ready to die in great numbers and must not permit treatment of ear and brain damage, work of Nobel Prize winner, Robert Baram.
They should continue to die or remain crippled by Infantile Paralysis because the discoverer of the anti-polio vaccine is a Jew, Jonas Salk.
"Muslims must refuse to use Streptomycin and continue to die of Tuberculosis because a Jew, Zalman Waxman, invented the wonder drug against this killing disease.
Muslim doctors must discard all discoveries and improvements by dermatologist Judas Sehn Benedict, or the lung specialist, Frawnkel, and of many other world renowned Jewish scientists and medical experts.
"In short, good and loyal Muslims properly and fittingly should remain afflicted with Syphilis, Gonorrhea, Heart Disease, Headaches, Typhus, Diabetes, Mental Disorders, Polio, Convulsions and Tuberculosis and be proud to obey the Islamic boycott."
It kind of sucks in my business, which is one which is not usually very optional. We have not hired for over two years and have laid off quite a few professionals and assistants. Do I see a re-do of Carter's stagflation?
It's nice to be able to walk over to the New York Public Library on my lunch break.
The Bird Dog lad, who can be a master of understatement. I view it as a great privilege and opportunity for him to have the chance to work in Manhattan. It's all good.
Are you and I machines? Are we analyzable without remainder into a collection of mechanisms whose operation can be fully explained by the causal operation of physical and chemical laws, starting from the parts and proceeding to the whole? It might seem so, judging from the insistent testimony of those whose work is to understand life.
There is little doubt about the biologist’s declared obsession with mechanisms of every sort — “genetic mechanisms,” “epigenetic mechanisms,” “regulatory mechanisms,” “signaling mechanisms,” “oncogenic mechanisms,” “immune mechanisms,” “circadian clock mechanisms,” “DNA repair mechanisms,” “RNA splicing mechanisms,” and even “molecular mechanisms of plasticity.” The single phrase “genetic mechanism” now yields over 25,000 hits in Google Scholar and the count seems to be rising by hundreds per month. But no cellular entity or process is exempt; everything has been or will be baptized a “mechanism.” In an informal analysis of technical papers I’ve collected, I found an average of 7.5 uses of mechanism per article, with the number in a single article varying from 1 to 32. This is not even counting cognate forms such as mechanistic and machine.
Using mechanical metaphors probably sounded advanced, and scientifically anti-vitalistic 100 years ago, but now it seems quaint. The metaphors we use are important, because they tend to be reified by people outside a given field of expertise.
We easily forget that vitalism was a metaphor, like phlogiston. Our next batch of metaphors for everything will be systems-oriented, until the next new thing comes along.
h/t Insty, who has been doing a heck of a job lately. I have never understood why people who view themselves as my betters seem to want to control me and my way of life. What motivates that desire for control?
It doesn’t take long, though, for a visitor to discover St. Aloysius’s most powerful asset: the rich content of its classroom instruction. St. Aloysius exemplifies the old-fashioned notion that school is a place where children learn about our civilization’s shared knowledge and values and where teachers remain the undisputed authorities in the classroom, imparting that knowledge and those values through a coherent grade-by-grade curriculum. This traditional approach has stood the test of time and is still proving itself today in many inner-city Catholic schools, in the “no excuses” charter schools operated by the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), in schools that have adopted E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum, and, to some extent, even in run-of-the-mill Massachusetts public schools that adhere to that state’s back-to-basics curriculum reforms (see “E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy,” Autumn 2009).
Teaching writing is a difficult task, if not a nearly impossible one. Eliminating standards and propagandizing is so much easier. So easy, any idiot can - and does - do it.
The thing is, you don't have to know a damn thing about the craft of writing to propagandize. This is truly appalling: Writing Teachers: Still Crazy After All These Years. Crazy, for sure, and utterly out of reality and out of usefulness.
You have to either laugh or cry.
It sounds like going to writing class today is like going to shop class and learning about the oppression of the worker instead of how to use a lathe. Might be useful if you want to become a Community Organizer, but not if you ever want to make anything.
Saturday morning, a stroll around the shrubby areas of the Olde Farm revealed a big movement of migrants overnight.
Towhees, calling and scratching in the ground cover:
Flocks of noisy Blue Jays - who do move south in the fall, leaving us in New England with the Canadian birds during the winter. You know what they look like.
Two flocks of about 20 White-throated Sparrows, scratching for bugs under the rose bushes and in the overgrown dead vegetable garden, singing their Spring song:
And a Sharpie buzzed past, doubtless following, and feeding upon, the tasty, tender little migrants:
Good morning, World!
Most images and links from/to the fine CLO bird info website.
In four days, this post is almost outdated. I heard Parula and Palm Warblers singing this morning -
What a fine distraction from the hassles of life. They can swallow good-sized bones now. They just devoured a crow, and it's sorta cool the way they know how to shoot their poops off the edge of the nest:
In my experience, most people do not spend much time thinking about policies or politics. That was fine, before government intruded into every area of our lives.
The O was born in Hawaii. I think the O is toying with the Birthers, playing them for fools. As for his grades, they probably did suck because he was a stoner. But graduating summa from HLS means something.
...deluded about what can be accomplished through mere professions of powerlessness, and advertising their fears as if they were virtues, those who guide the fortunes of the world’s only superpower have embarked upon an experiment in virtual demilitarization.
Serious gardeners in New England, especially food-gardeners, build coldframes to extend the growing season. Properly done, you can add at least a month to the growing season for some things.
I used to mess with things like that, but I don't bother anymore. If I lived in Maine, though, I'd definitely have a coldframe full of spinach, leaf lettuces, etc.
I've even tried putting tomatoes out in late April here, but it never works out. Milk jugs, polyurethane, etc. Big hassle. Fact is, around here, if you put them out in late May they quickly catch up to the early birds, and even exceed them because they have endured no cool weather stresses. Tomatoes do not really put on growth without warm nights - above 55 F. We are still in the 30s on some nights.
If you have money to burn, the best thing is a good-sized real greenhouse. I would attach one to the house, with interior and exterior doors, so you could just open the door and let the rich earthy and flower and herb and plant smells infuse the house. Home-grown Beefsteak tomatoes 12 months/year.
Pic is Beefsteaks, the only tomato I truly enjoy eating, especially when hot from the sun. We usually only get a few weeks of them ripening, mid-late August-early September. Is it worth the trouble? For me, it is. It is especially pleasant when you can find a big ripe one that a squirrel or chipmunk has not taken a bite out of.
I had to run home this afternoon to meet with my chimney guy. Actually, not my chimney guy, but my semi-local sheet-metal guy.
I never had a sheet-metal guy, but I'm glad to have one now. He can make whatever you need in his wood-heated shop in an old mill building in CT, and he will install what he makes, too. Cheerfully.
Our old farmhouse has three fireplaces. We needed some new flashing, new collars, caps, etc. to keep the rain and the animals out. That was a piece of cake for the good old guy. He promised me that his patch-up job would outlive me, which isn't saying much. In olde Yankeeland, everything is a patch-up job.
I chatted up his 20-something black assistant. He said "Man, we have a beautiful shop. We can make anything - copper, aluminum, stainless, plain steel - whatever you want. Ducts, flashing, roofs, gutters, whatever. Square ducting, round ducting, whatever you need. We have the technology. We built our own wood stove too."
"What do you do for wood?" I asked.
"Oh, our tree guy friends just dump it off for us. Saves them a dump fee. We cut and split it ourselves. We load the stove up at night, and it's as warm as toast when we come to work in the morning."
The latest Marxist trick, cloaked in virtue but a wolf in sheep's clothing: The Sustainability Agenda.
Watermelons: Green on the outside, Red on the inside. They want my money, and to control my life. It ain't going to happen because She Who Must Be Obeyed would not permit it.
In 1882, Klein imagined sewing two Möbius Loops together to create a single sided bottle with no boundary. Its inside is its outside, it contains itself, and you can almost do it yourself… but not quite because you’ll need a fourth dimension to get the surface to pass through itself without making a hole.
Well, if you can’t make one, you can always buy one, at Acme, of course, http://www.kleinbottle.com/. Yep, no doubt about it: Your Acme's Klein Bottle is a real Riemannian manifold, just waiting for you to define a Euclidean metric at every point.
Because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly;
Because of all the television commercials, cocktail parties, and assorted social posturing I thus escape;
Because in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing things they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion;
Because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed or impressed by power, but respond only to quietude and humility and endless patience;
Because I suspect that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don't want to waste the trip;
Because mercifully there are no telephones on trout waters;
Because only in the woods can I find solitude without loneliness;
Because bourbon out of an old tin cup always tastes better out there;
Because maybe one day I will catch a mermaid;
And finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important, but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant - and not nearly so much fun.
Robert Traver
A mermaid, or a cougar in a tree? Cougar safely below the fold -
The MSM never told us, but inquiring minds want to know and are curious because he ran for President of the USA and won an election (h/t Sistah). Caveat: I hold nobody's past or stupid youth against them, because we are in America where we are free to invent and re-invent ourselves if we wish to:
Traditionally, when Microsoft releases a new version of Internet Exploder, a chill runs through the geek community as we cower and tremble, wondering what have they done to the poor thing this time? Some favorite button is now gone? That one tricky thing it did is now history? That one feature that you found quite useful, but nobody else did, has been removed because nobody else did?
There's always something we can count on to gripe, moan, carp, whine and bitch about.
But, showing that Microsoft can be even crueler than cruel, this time they played the dirtiest trick on all on us:
They didn't change anything.
And if that isn't spitting in the face on tradition, I don't know what is.
Pic: The lovely Melanie proudly displays two of Doc's favorite logos.
Oh, I might also mention that it's now faster than goose shit when accessing blog sites. Review & setup tips are below the fold.
If opportunity in America is a sham — if the system is rigged and some people get the breaks only for reasons of luck, birth, or discrimination — then merit is fictitious and redistribution brings greater fairness. But if America is an opportunity society — if you have the chance to work harder, get more education and innovate — then rewarding merit is fair, and it is fair for some to make more money than others.
Most Americans believe we live in an opportunity society. The General Social Survey has asked Americans since 1973 to answer whether people get ahead because of “their own hard work” or because of “lucky breaks and help from other people.” For four decades, 60 to 70 percent of Americans have said “hard work,” while never more than 16 percent have said “lucky breaks.”
It’s hardly a shock that seven in 10 Americans believe in the American dream. If you descended from immigrants, ask yourself: Why did my ancestors come here? I suspect it wasn’t to find a fairer system of forced income redistribution. It was to find a place where they could get a fair shake, where they could start their own business, and where hard work and good ideas would be rewarded.
Politicians have denied the core American belief in opportunity at their peril.
Well, luck, motivation, and personality traits are involved too. However, luck favors the prepared mind, and "Showing up is 70% of success." Most heirs, like most lottery winners, blow their good fortunes on instant gratification. Furthermore, many people do not pursue wealth and "getting ahead" as a life goal anyway. It's just one of many possible choices of life goals, although the Marxists and Materialists might see it otherwise. Choosing life goals is a very big deal, differentiates the adults from the kids, and, for most, is probably best done in a partnership. "Chacun a son gout" - which does not mean each selects his own path to gout.
Great idea, Robert. But my Doc doesn't do Medicare. He wants to get paid for his time and interest in my well-being, and he should be. I pay him, with my own money. I thank him, too, and also send him a holiday basket of goodies for his family.
It's not mainly about oil prices. It's about hedging the dollar with commodities, it seems to me. Global investors must hedge their risks somehow, and China wants to dump dollars. Gold, silver, oil - anything real instead of paper money.
If you’re looking for a place with a remarkably high concentration of literary eminences who can be counted on to spout incredibly fatuous political clichés in a consistently self-regarding tone (though heaven knows why, aside from sheer masochism, you’d be looking for such a place), pack your mukluks and set sail for the frozen North. For the fact is that an extraordinary percentage of this region’s most honored and bestselling writers harbor an ardent, palpable, quivering contempt for America and Israel, and express it in a language that’s breathtaking for its utter lack of moderation, nuance, or restraint (or, for that matter, originality).
The good Balsamic Vinegar comes from Modena (home of Ferrari, Maserati, and Lamborghini), where they have been making it for a thousand years. I have some days when I hunger for some Balsamic.
It's called "balsamic" because it was thought to be a good balsam, or balm, for pain and disease. Our North American Balsam Fir was thought to be good for diseases too, hence its name. The Romans viewed vinegar as a balm and a medicine - hence the Roman soldier kindly offering Jesus vinegar on the cross.
They make it from boiled-down Trebbiano grape juice. Balsamic Vinegar is not a wine vinegar.
The aging process seems to be key. As the volume shrinks over time and the vinegar becomes more syrupy, it is moved into smaller and smaller wood casks made of different woods until ready. Juniper is the final cask. 15 and 25 year-old Italian Balsamic Vinegars are readily available, and there are 100 year-old ones. The 15 year-old one in the photo is $70/bottle. Unlike a bottle of wine of that price, however, you only have to use a few drops at a time.
Northern Italians would never touch our supermarket stuff, nor would any really good American restaurant. However, the available quality is getting better and better.
The old story Marcella Hazan relates is about the old Northern Italian guy who ran down to the cellar when the Americans began bombing. Then he remembered, and ran up to the room where his precious small casks of very old Balsamic were stored and rushed them down to the cellar. Then he realized that he had forgotten one more thing: His wife.
Ever tried a good Balsamic on strawberries? It's a classic Italian dessert. It's equally good on fresh fig halves with a touch of honey or sugar. Just make sure you use the good stuff.
Mark Steyn reports that his childrens' Kinder Eggs were seized by US Customs as he and they crossed the border from Canada to the US. According to Customs: "Many of the toys that have been tested by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in the past were determined to present a choking hazard for young children....Last year, CBP officers discovered more than 25,000 of these banned chocolate eggs. More than 2,000 separate seizures were made of this product." As Steyn states, however: "And yet oddly enough generations of European and Latin American children remain unchoked."
If you don't know what Kinder Eggs are, they are hollow chocolate eggs with ingenious little assembly toys inside.
Each Summer, my wife and boys visit grandma in Germany. My wife brings back two egg cartons of twelve Kinder Eggs in each carton. Throughout the year they provide exceptional motivational rewards for the boys. My wife is as paranoid as most mothers about her childrens' safety, and as prone as most to believe most scares. The boys have collected several hundred of Kinder Egg toys. They reacted with deep disappointment this morning when I told them they are now illegal to bring into the US , then asked Mom if they could eat them all before getting on the plane home. My wife is trying to figure out something else as powerful a motivational reward as Kinder Eggs.
There's someone in Washington smiling that another motivation for individual effort has been broken and outlawed.
If human beings were going to invent a religion based on wishful thinking, they could come up with something a lot “easier” than Christianity. After all, why not wish for a religion that promised eternal life in heaven, but at the same time allowed promiscuous sex, encouraged gluttony, did away with all the commandments, and forbade anyone to ever mention the idea of judgment and punishment?
Yes - why not, doggone it? We have no problem with atheists - or with any other religions, here at Maggie's. Life, and consciousness, is a deep mystery and a puzzlement, and we all must find our own ways through it with whatever sources of illumination we can find. As readers know, I am a Jesus guy - and I am not even particularly attracted to the idea of eternal life.
"Be not affrighted. Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him." Mark 16:6
Christ, the Lord, is risen today, Alleluia! Sons of men and angels say, Alleluia! Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia! Sing, ye heavens, and earth, reply, Alleluia!
Love's redeeming work is done, Alleluia! Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia! Lo! the Sun's eclipse is over, Alleluia! Lo! He sets in blood no more, Alleluia!
Vain the stone, the watch, the seal, Alleluia! Christ hath burst the gates of hell, Alleluia! Death in vain forbids His rise, Alleluia! Christ hath opened paradise, Alleluia!
Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia! Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia! Once He died our souls to save, Alleluia! Where thy victory, O grave? Alleluia!
Soar we now where Christ hath led, Alleluia! Following our exalted Head, Alleluia! Made like Him, like Him we rise, Alleluia! Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!
The wonderful tune which brings back every Easter in one's life, and a few tears, too. Composer? Unknown. Words by Charles Wesley, 1739. The verses were written for the opening of the Wesleyan Chapel in London, in an old foundry. Hence the term Foundry Collection of hymns.
Image is William Blake's Resurrection
The rest of Wesley's verses of the song are on the continuation page, below.
Preparing Easter feast for after church tomorrow for my in-laws and all the kids we can collect.
Two of my sisters are going to tend to the old folks this weekend while we finally seek some serious home help for them. I think I was in denial about their decline: it is painful to face as they have always had so much adventurousness, vitality, and work-and-study ethic.
Our menu is Butternut Squash Soup with nutmeg with a dollop of sour cream and my special homemade crouton, Arista (bone in, with garlic and rosemary - Arista is pork loin-rib roast, Tuscan-style), roast potatoes, stuffing with apples, apple sauce, roast parsnips, and Brussel Sprouts with garlic and oil. A nice Cote Roti.
For dessert, Wheat Pie, Rice Pie - and a Bunny Cake! With my good Mexican coffee. A multicultural Easter feast.
Next year, I want to make an Italian Easter Pie - Pizza Rustica.
I'd do it in a minute, if I could take 22 days off work.
Warren Buffet once said the the main advantage in life about being rich is private travel. We regular people easily forget that wealthy people worry as much, or more, about money than regular folks. They have more to worry about.
I rarely have a chance to travel by private jet, but have done so enough to say that it is very good. For my luxury, Mrs. BD just informed me that she rented an Alpha Romeo for me for our 10 days in Umbria. Only 100 E. more than the VW. Definitely worth it. Happy Bird Dog.
One of the best things about writing program reviews is that sometimes someone springs out of the woodwork with a better suggestion. A while back I wrote a review on 'Start Menu 7', a replacement Start Menu for Windows 7. But while it works perfectly, it still costs twenty clams.
Enter 'Classic Start Menu' (where do they dream up these wild and crazy names?), a free replacement that mimics the old style menu perfectly. It's also quite configurable so you can get rid on any unwanted Start Menu entries, like "Help & Support", the ultra-worthless 'Search' box, and arrange the columns and icons to just the right size.
But the main thing is that the menus auto-expand — like in the old days — so there's no unnecessary clicking. If I want to access 'Process Explorer' inside of my 'Tools' Start Menu folder, that's 5 mouse clicks with the stock Start Menu, 2 with Classic.
Additional info (and some other program suggestions for Win7) is below the fold.
Jurassic President - Obama's preserved in the amber of an echo chamber where the romanticized version of the 1930s, seen through the new-age gauze of the 1970s, is paradise.
As we have always contended here, the Left are dinosaurs and the myth of the omniscient State is dead. Defunct. An ex-myth. Gone to the choir invisible.
The Lefties often express thoughts about killing, suppressing or censoring those with whom they disagree. Ideology is their Jihad. At Maggie's, we enjoy having our ideas challenged. We welcome fact-based disagreement, but not emotional rants.
America has 400 billionaires with a combined net worth of $1.3 trillion. Congress could confiscate their stocks and bonds, and force them to sell their businesses, yachts, airplanes, mansions and jewelry. The problem is that after fleecing the rich of their income and net worth, and the Fortune 500 corporations of their profits, it would only get us to mid-August.
...President Obama is the culmination of a century of foreign infiltration already in place. The turning of America’s institutions of higher education took place decades ago; it is too little too late to focus on such infiltration now. Beginning in the early 20th century, America’s colleges and universities were infiltrated by German thought, then thought to be the most sophisticated in the world. That school of thought, a merger of Hegelian utopianism and Marxist classism, quickly infected America’s halls of power. Theodore Roosevelt, always trendy, bought into the new “progressivism” with alacrity, jettisoning the Constitution and capitalism in the process. Bringing this perverse ideology to American shores, Teddy announced, “We of to-day who stand for the Progressive movement here in the United States are not wedded to any particular kind of machinery, save solely as means to the end desired.” This was the philosophy of incipient dictatorship. It was brought to its near-term apex under a college professor, Woodrow Wilson, who thought that the Constitution itself needed to be stripped away.
The fact is that we can't keep Medicare as it is. It's broke. We are only arguing about how to transform it. Obama wants the experts to ration, and Ryan wants individuals to chose the type insurance they prefer. Do you trust 50 million consumers making their own financial decisions, or a dozen carefully chosen experts? What could go wrong?
... the rate of income taxation on the highest earning Americans has fluctuated drastically, from 25 percent of income in 1930 to 92 percent of income in the early 1950’s. Despite these vast differences in these top marginal rates, the total percentage of GDP the federal government has collected in revenue has changed little.
The "rich" won't work for nothing. If you take too much of their compensation for their efforts, they just retire, cut back on work, invest in munis, or give their money away. One interesting fact in her essay is that the "rich," as measured by income, are not the same people from one year to another in the US. We have high income mobility here.
God grant that I may live to fish, until my dying day, And when it comes to my last cast, I then most humbly pray, When in the Lord's safe landing net, I'm peacefully asleep, That in his mercy I be judged, As big enough to keep.
Credible, mainstream foreign policy analysts express dismay that President Obama’s foreign policy actions are so often contradictory, misdirected from commonly perceived national interests, and counterproductive to even stated goals.
Such critiques, seeking sanity and to avoid extremism and conspiracy theories, just stop there. In these analysts further defense, the facts of foreign policy failures are enough to indict. In their limited purview, that is sufficient. However, if one is searching for deeper explanation in order to avoid or prevent the repetition of such wrong-headedness impaling the US national interests, another additional approach is needed.
In the lack of extensive internal documents (a la, to some extent, the “Pentagon Papers”) a functional analysis of President Obama’s foreign policies looks at outcomes to discern cause(s). When the outcomes are similar, there is more reason to look for common cause. In other words, the outcomes are either consciously purposeful and may have a common purpose and cause, or highly likely due to conditioning. These two can come together when the structure of justification for the conditioning is verbalized and then used by the actor. President Obama’s leftist worldview is that conditioning and conscious purpose.
The caveat must be raised that functional analysis is, like any theory when applied to real life, unable to explain or predict every cause or action, and can be abused to impose an inadequately supported structure. For example, most wizened observers of human affairs agree that “stupidity” is usually a better explanation than “mendacity” in understanding the foibles or mistakes of men.
For example, this criticism was tellingly made by critics of the Cold War revisionist historians who ascribed its origins to exploitive and rapacious capitalism and the consequent purposeful expansionism of America’s leaders, downplaying the role and actions of the Soviet Union’s leaders as well as the gaps in information upon which our leaders had to act or react. Further analyses of the Cold War revisionist historians’ works more simply showed poor historiography. More measured contemporary historians, now with access to more Soviet archives and Western, see some less adventurous motivations and choices by Stalin, communist ideology at work alongside any realpolitik, and more confusion and reserved responses by and among Western leaders in the Cold War battles.
The Marxism underlying the Cold War revisionist historians’ world view was, as is Marxism, a form of functional analysis. From the outcome of post-war global dominance by the US and the conflicts with spreading communism, the cause was ascribed of a “mendacious,” conniving US pursuing resources and seeking the subjugation of colonial peoples.
There will be more future transparency into President Obama’s foreign policies that will expose greater confusion and reservations than seems the case now. The confidence of Americans after World War II, the expansion of our economy, and some racism may have been among causes for some US excesses. President Obama’s foreign policies appear almost the reverse: lack of confidence in US exceptionalism – our deserved heightened confidence in our good motives and actions, neglect of maintaining or growing the US economy, and siding with those opposed to states aligned with or benign toward US foreign policies. In this, President Obama is acting out his leftist upbringing and education.
As with the Cold War revisionist historians, and the wider leftist critique of America, President Obama basically takes and acts upon their view that the US and the West is mostly at fault for conflict and the unreached aspirations of those seen as oppressed.
President Obama was raised and educated in this leftist view. Yes, he is limited by others in our society and politics. But, he has been both consistent and determined in pursuing his view. His half-measures of continuity in Iraq and Afghanistan are compromises with contrary facts and views, but his half-measures are likely to fail and still, thus, further his view. Functionally, President Obama is the foe of the US.
In the Middle East, this functional analysis of President Obama’s foreign policies is most evident. President Obama buys that the source of conflict is the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, and that Israel – the stronger – is at fault. The Palestinians are oppressed by Israel. The other states in the Middle East – all autocratic or despotic -- that have come to terms with Israel or whose policies don’t really threaten Israel are viewed negatively. The states that more actively oppose and threaten Israel are viewed as whom we should favor. Islamist ideology is either ignored or seen benignly as a spur to violence and conflict. Arab states and Iran’s internal policies of corruption, exploitation and repression are not viewed as the source of their backwardness or hostilities.
In short, in functional analysis, President Obama really acts to lessen the power of the US and its exertion and to increase the power and exertions of those opposed to the US and its allies. The rationalizations he has inculcated from his leftist past try to publicly justify this in evasions and euphemisms. Indeed, he may not consciously want the defeat of the West and victories by its foes. But that is the result and it is all rooted in his leftist world view.
Those, of whatever political orientation, who avoid calling him out as, functionally, the foe of Western values and US national interests are doing their listeners a serious harm by reducing the justified wholesale rejection of President Obama’s foreign policies. Worse, they mask the cause and its rejection, allowing it to reappear among others and further harm the US, its values and its allies.
The administration has sat on its hands despite the fact that the Assad regime is one of the most implacable U.S. adversaries in the Middle East. It is Iran’s closest ally; it supplies Iranian weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip for use against Israel. Since 2003 it has helped thousands of jihadists from across the Arab world travel to Iraq to attack American soldiers. It sought to build a secret nuclear reactor with the help of North Korea and destabilized the pro-Western government of neighboring Lebanon by sponsoring a series of assassinations....
Yet the Obama administration has effectively sided with the regime against the protesters.
Patients are not consumers and physicians are not "providers": they are in a professional relationship of extremely personal and intimate content, in which judgement and individualized attention and care are required. Mutual trust and committment are key, and that is what Krugman wants.
On the other hand, Krugman would like us all standing in lines in government clinics. I think Krugman is a mixed-up person.
Solar project 
It's nice to be able to walk over to the New York Public Library on my lunch break.
Image of Ben Franklin's daily sched via 
Serious gardeners in New England, especially food-gardeners, build 
The latest Marxist trick, cloaked in virtue but a wolf in sheep's clothing: 
A friend sends this:
Earth Day
Well, that was disappointing.
The good Balsamic Vinegar comes from 
Christ, the Lord, is risen today, Alleluia!
Preparing Easter feast for after church tomorrow for my in-laws and all the kids we can collect. 
One of the best things about writing program reviews is that sometimes someone springs out of the woodwork with a better suggestion. A while back I wrote a review on 'Start Menu 7', a replacement Start Menu for Windows 7. But while it works perfectly, it still costs twenty clams.
It's 
Fisherman's Prayer
