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.
In the last go-round, they accused the raters of being too lenient. I think the raters are trying to find a delicate way of opining that Greece and Portugal are technically bankrupt.
Catholics keep talking about “calling,” and asking people to stop yakking about what they “deserve” long enough to seriously ask, “Is it truly for me? Is it what I am called to? Is there a possibility that I am not supposed to have this, in order to open my life up to something else? What might that be? Am I being led somewhere I had not imagined?”
We humans have a remarkable talent for rationalizing our feelings and behaviors. The world is full of hot guys and hot babes, and all sorts of other tempting things. One cannot have them all.
I know this supermarket well. It's the last supermarket before you turn north, last chance to stock up. After that, not much except Lema's and Cumbie's.
The overgrown thing had taken on a corroded aspect from the depredations of the beetles; it looked like a leprous dragon, smelled like a grandmother, and pinched like a mortgage when you touched it looking for errant shuttlecocks or wiffleballs.
What happened to all of those Japanese Beetles that used to eat the roses? I haven't seen one in years. My Mom used to send us out to pick them off of her roses and drop them in little jars of gasoline. Like picking blueberries.
Pork for all! Greece is bankrupt, and everybody knows it. There is no way they will ever pay back what they have borrowed to sustain their vote-buying politics. Maybe they could just sell the whole country to Club Med, and change those Euros or Drachmas into drink beads.
Brits can't get top students to go to medical school anymore (nobody really wants to work for the NHS) - so they have to import docs from Whereisitstan.
She sort-of agrees with David Brooks. I don't know what I think except that the Dems cannot stop spending money they don't have to give people stuff they don't want. Plunder politics.
"There are 80,000 bartenders in the United States with bachelor's degrees," Vedder said. He says that 17 percent of baggage porters and bellhops have a college degree, 15 percent of taxi and limo drivers.
Nothing wrong with that (a bartender who can discuss Paradise Lost with you is a good thing) - unless those folks were scammed into getting those diplomas as a financial investment. I see many parallels with sub-prime mortgage sales. Most colleges these days are all about sales - warm bodies with loans in hand. It's become the Big Education industry, built on debt.
No Republican has won the presidency without significant name recognition entering primary season since Warren G. Harding in 1920. That is because Republicans have to face down Democrats’ constant attacks on their personhood, attacks are made more effective because the Republican platform is supposed to be personal responsibility and aspirational performance standards, while the Democratic platform is handouts, pure and simple. The only way for Republicans to win is to make it widely known to the American public prior to their demonization that they are good and decent human beings.
President Obama’s only hope, by contrast, is to personalize, polarize, and destroy. It’s pure Alinsky, and it will work unless Republicans nominate someone so honest and eminently kind that Obama’s criticism seems as foolish as it clearly is.
One of our white mophead varieties - Blushing Bride - in bloom right now, and, in typical hydrangea style, with a little mid-day wilt from being planted (by me) in a tad too much sunshine:
The alarmists are playing whack-a-mole with any data which does not fit their hypotheses and predictions. This is the stuff of politicians, children, and litigators, not scientists.
One definition: An error in reasoning in which one assumes that the observed relationship between current events and some historical events represents a causal relationship.
Such reasoning is not consistent with the scientific method. When data don't fit your hypothesis, you can't makes excuses for your data while leaving your hypothesis unchanged.
If you play that game, you also violate the rules of Falsifiability by making a non-falsifiable hypothesis. My bold:
(Karl Popper) A conjecture or hypothesis must be accepted as true until such time as it is proven to be false. Popper maintains that scientists approach the truth through what he calls "conjecture and refutation." In actuality, scientists approach the truth not through conjecture and refutation, but through conjecture and CONFIRMATION, i.e. demonstration, by means of careful experiment, that a hypothesis corresponds to the facts of reality. Until the phenomenon is proven TRUE there is no obligation to base my attitude toward it on the assumption that it MIGHT be true. If there were such an obligation, then I would be obliged to give serious consideration to every crackpot notion that has ever been put forward.
If an hypothesis cannot be refuted by data, it's not science: it's a belief system. The evidence that there has been no warming for over a decade is difficult data indeed in light of their hysterical predictions, so now they have invented covert warming. This is pathetic and embarassing. Tweaking computer models to fit unexpected data is not science. It's overt fudging.
As a commenter at Watts pointed out, with some math adjusting you can prove Ptolemy's solar system to be an accurate model.
What... emerges from this is a convenient flexible device to explain any climate change and blame it on humans. Is there warming? Its caused by CO2. Cooling? It can only be smokestack particles.
"Just like we can’t make the organic morphology of slums fit into the modern rules of property ownership, we can’t make traditionally emergent cities through the current planning system. (All efforts to produce traditional neighborhoods have so far produced only imitations of them.) ..."
Indeed, a neigborhood can not be "made." I think of planned development like Disneyworld: phoney to the point of creepy. Stepford places where you can't grow things in your front lawn.
Have you ever seen a new housing development in the US with a corner store, a cheap barbershop, or a local pub? Apparently there is a market for the unreal and sanitized.
It is hard to understand politics if you are hung up on reality. Politicians leave reality to others. What matters in politics is what you can get the voters to believe, whether it bears any resemblance to reality or not.
Under Johnson, an important Democratic operative, Fannie Mae became, Morgenson and Rosner say, “the largest and most powerful financial institution in the world.” Its power derived from the unstated certainty that the government would be ultimately liable for Fannie’s obligations. This assumption and other perquisites were subsidies to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac worth an estimated $7 billion a year. They retained about a third of this.
Morgenson and Rosner report that in 1998, when Fannie Mae’s lending hit $1 trillion, its top officials began manipulating the company’s results to generate bonuses for themselves. That year Johnson’s $1.9 million bonus brought his compensation to $21 million. In nine years, Johnson received $100 million.
At Big Government yesterday, Phillip Dennis asked, “What Has Happened to Liberals In the Past 50 Years?” Here’s one answer: They went from viewing America as a beacon of freedom (or a Shining City upon a Hill, to borrow a phrase popular with both liberal icon JFK and former Roosevelt liberal Ronald Wilson Reagan) worth sharing with a beleaguered world to a Show About Nothing during that time. If only they had Upped Their Game during this period, instead.
Time-saving projects always take more time than one expects.
We have always been partial to a gardening mix with hanging baskets, large pots, and planters. According to my local expert Mrs. BD, pots can add structure and height to flower gardens. The only thing that drives her nuts are clashing colors, and she does not like to permit annuals to steal the show from precious perennials and flowering shrubs with their frequently more subtle colors. (Furthermore, she believes that varied and interesting foliage is just as important in a garden as are blooms.) Red annuals? Fugeddaboutit. She says they are for McDonald's and banks - commercial-looking. She is right that overly-bright flowers look commercial and tacky rather than homey unless they are the only thing you are growing.
You could say that she feels that using any annuals is cheating, but I am not so doctrinaire about the elite gardening rules.
Our gardening trick for in-ground gardens is to use plenty of mulch instead of using irrigation, but if you enjoy pots and planters the way the Italians do, and do not always remember to, or bother to, lug watering cans around every night or every morning with all of the other things that need doing, you can assemble one of these sorts of cool dripper systems, set the timer, and forget about them until frost. Our cousins on Nantucket use them for all of their rental houses, and they work great. The mini-hoses are invisible.
Trust me. They'll look much better and grow better with daily water. Pots and planters dry out in one sunny summer day. (Smaller pots don't even make it through a day.) The occasional light dose of Miracle Gro in planters doesn't hurt either.
This post may seem to some as “inside baseball” but it illustrates a wider issue of being diligently informed for civil discourse and for effectiveness in supporting a cause, while not shirking from calling out those -- even allies -- who dangerously undermine that cause.
Europe has a deeper and historic anti-Semitism than in the US, and its Jews are proportionately and politically weaker than in the US. In this sense, European Jews may be more dependent on the efforts of non-Jews to defend themselves and Israel. This defense – here or there -- is based on the increasing realization, among Jews and gentiles, that it is part of a wider defense of the West, its culture and security against Islamist jihadists. Europe has also been more accomodationist toward Islamist offenses and offenders, partly out of post-WWII pacifism and retreat from global responsibilities and partly from it placing its energy and trade interests paramount. Both the US and Europe have activist Leftist and pro-Palestinian communities, but in the US they are far more marginalized in both public opinion and government policy, and there is lower tolerance for them. In Europe, allies are harder to come by, which can lead to infiltration by some who are anti-Islamist jihad but anti-Semitic, and slower reaction.
There is a blog dispute between blog friends, Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs blog and"Baron Bodissey and Dymphna" at Gates Of Vienna (GOV) blog, about the infiltration by some anti-Semites tarnishing of anti-jihadist English Defense League. Geller, an early supporter of the EDL, says she "did not want to write" her post exposing anti-Semitism infiltration within EDL but is required to go there as "I cannot and will not sanction anti-Semitic infiltration." Accordingly, subject to EDL leadership's promised purge of such elements, she has distanced herself from the EDL. The GOV bloggers have reacted with an Open Letter in which they criticize Geller as over-reacting. Geller's reply, in her typical fashion, minces few words:
“The question is, has the congressional power to regulate interstate commerce been so loosely construed that now Congress can do anything at all, that there is nothing it cannot do.
“Let me ask the three of you. Obviously, obesity and its costs affect interstate commerce. Does Congress have the constitutional power to require obese people to sign up for Weight Watchers? If not, why not?”
Apparently none of the Dems on the panel could answer that question.
...in the frenzy of our entitlement mania, where happiness is viewed as an "unalienable Right," we are losing the freedom to fail. That loss is a major factor in America's decline. Much of the unprecedented growth of government aims to protect people from the consequences of failure and the vagaries of life.
There’s no arguing with the result of a Rasmussen poll of who was the “greatest founding father”, George Washington. But the choices to select from -- Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington or James Madison? – excluded Patrick Henry and his key role in rallying the new Americans to rebel against Britain and then to enact the new Constitution’s Bill of Rights to further protect individual liberties and states’ rights.
A biographer of Patrick Henry calls him “the first American to sound his displeasure with big government.”
The best rendition of America the Beautiful ever, by Ray Charles. (It could be a clearer copy, but still the best way to start the 4th of July - or any day in the good old USA.)
Our Founding Fathers are our Knights of the Round Table, and our revolutionary war farmer/soldiers were our knights, just as our soldiers today are our knights. All of these knights risked, and risk, their lives and everything, so we can live as we please. It is almost too much of a good deal, for which humble and deep gratitude is the only proper attitude.
We all do wonder whether we risk enough, sacrifice enough for the freedom we take for granted: probably not. Thanks to those who have preceded us, we have it easy; maybe too easy, and take it all for granted. Shame on me, if I do.
The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
Imagine the pics I could take for Maggie's with one of these sorts of babies instead of my Costco pocket point and shoots. Trouble is, I'd never carry one of those larger things around - just a pain in the ass to lug a camera around all day when you're hiking in the woods with bottles of water, or up and down the hills of Spoleto or Norcia with a shopping bag full of jars of truffles and truffle sauce and and cinghiale salumi and Umbrian olive oil and stringozzi. When you shrink all those magapixels down to size, you lose the detail anyway.
The experience is the thing. A pic is just a souvenir, and the camera can be a distraction from simply "being there". And, in general, nobody wants to look at anybody else's artful pics (altho some folks seem to enjoy my travel pics on Maggie's but I make extra effort to make them informative rather than artful, illos of a mini-narrative).
It's fun to go places, sometimes, camera-free so you don't end up a slave to the lens. Same thing with periodically going a week or two without looking at the internet, or without beer.
Freedom from habits, whether good habits or bad ones, can be enlightening.
In the Western world, beach bathing is a late 18th-19th Century phenomenon.
Bathing became fashionable because, like taking spa water, it was thought to be healthful. A form of "taking the cure" for neurasthenia or whatever.
Furthermore, before then nobody went to the beach anyway, and having a tan was for peasants only. It was a sign that you labored outdoors. Nobody knew how to swim, either (as in Italy today).
Native peoples, especially in warm climates, knew how to swim. The Front Crawl, aka Australian Crawl (now universally used for Freestyle racing), was adopted by Western Civ around the turn of the century, via Solomon Islanders who used this speedy stroke.
Here's a history of women's bathing attire. They definitely did not swim in these things. You would rapidly drown. Maybe they just got a little wet up to their knees, and splashed some water on their faces.
Even today, most people do not go to the beach to swim. They go to read, to watch their kids play in the sand and waves, to obtain some beneficial rays of the sun, to enjoy a sea breeze blowing over their near-naked body, to take a cooling dip, or to surf or body surf where there are good waves.
And how many places can one go out in public and exhibit one's gorgeous, erotic self in what is basically underwear?
When Perrodel Pájaro said it was going to be a 'long' weekend this morning, he wasn't kidding. With the 1st falling on a Friday, you can bet this'll be a 3½, if not 4-day holiday for many. Here's to ya. <clink!>
If you're looking for something to do, I have a few ideas to toss into the mix.
Speak Up!
Do I really have to tell you how important this next election is? Are you honestly just going to sit there on your duff the whole time, or are you going to be a part of it? If Obama is reelected, who ya gonna blame? Everybody else for not being more proactive?
I'll be debuting this site next week sometime, but it's rarin' to go now:
If you're one of those 'blogger' type o' guys, please grab the link and spread it far and wide.
Unless you'd rather go through four more years of this, of course.
Home Repair
Finally! At last you don't have some cheap, paltry excuse to hand the wife on why you can't get to all those fix-it jobs that have been piling up!
Lucky you!
Rather than this being a "how-to" site, it's more like a "Can I do it?" site, and should give you a pretty good idea as to whether you can handle it yourself or not.
A water heater is a pretty good example. Because they're large, they look kind of 'serious', and most people's first thought would be to call the plumber if it started to leak. But when you actually look at what exactly needs to be unhooked, it's really quite simple, and bendable supply lines mean you don't have to get an exact replacement so the inlet and outlet pipes match up. And, just between you and me, a pipe wrench is probably cheaper than a 4-hour visit from the union plumber.
Now in Deutsch, Français y Español!
Guaranteed Original*
*discounting coincidence, of course
I rarely write unless I have something new to add to the narrative, or a fresh slant on something. The OJ jury got it right. Magellan was a lie. Maggie's Farm is politically centrist. You know, the usual kind of wild hyperbole you expect in the blogosphere. A nice little intro to my unique style is here. The main site is here:
And for your visual delight:
Fly The Friendly Skies
Have you heard of Google Earth? It basically lets you fly around the globe in your own personal space ship, then zoom way in to look at your topless neighbor sunbathing historical monuments. It's a series of constantly-updated images from every spot on the globe, and there are big sites out there dedicated to posting the latest crazy/odd/beautiful spots people find. You click on the link and your own program takes you there. Very cool.
There are gigantic compass roses out there that you'd never have a clue what they were from the ground, as well as a whole shitload of wild mazes, cities and terrain in 3-D (you can fly between buildings and down the Grand Canyon), real-time airline tracking, real-time weather, strange geoglyphic inscriptions spanning the length of a football field — and that's not to mention some very convincing alien crop circles.
I've put together a number of video tours to show off this remarkable program. The 'Google Goofs' tour is hysterical.
American Front Lawn Update: 
Sipp recalls 
How Greece's 
A perfect example of it: 
Fascinating.
The 
Or, at least, some modest help towards buying one of them, which is far more likely. Just a little help. 
In the Western world, 
