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.
Thanks to the librarian at Bird Dog’s local library he is able to send us brief messages from the only computer working in town. Also, thanks to the local librarian, the line is long to use the computer, as middle-aged men dawdle to ogle. So, here again are some links for your evening perusal.
"The one common theme throughout these cases is that they were decided in favor of keeping the unions in power and blocking the ability of employees to challenge whether or not the unions still enjoy majority status," U.S. Chamber of Commerce Senior Vice President of Labor Randel Johnson said in an email.
That tropical storm up here dumped the river into my pool, filled it with mud, plants, and frogs, and knocked down a fence. I think VT got the worst of it all.
What books are you reading right now?
No cheating. Don't tell us that you are reading Kant.
I am reading the new Mark Twain autobiography, but you cannot really read it. You just dip into it. He was a charming fellow.
Reno at First Things looked at the life of Moses from an interesting angle: the multicultural man turned uni-cultural by the hand of God. A quote:
Each of us must struggle to understand how to live our lives in a pluralistic, democratic society. But to my mind, however fuzzy and uncertain we might be about any particular public policy or social project, we must at least be clear about Moses. We should want to follow his trajectory, and there can be no compromise with those who prize his multicultural youth. For he who is not a servant of a cultural authority deeply installed is merely human�which is to say, a slave to his passions and servant of his self-interest, who, when he comes to realize his base existence, is all too easily victim of thin, ideological deities who promise the immediate psychological satisfactions of a veneer of moral idealism.
Still without phone, intertunnel, and TV (but who needs TV?). Posting this memo from a very crowded library - nobody around here has intertunnel connections this week. Even the cell towers got screwed up, somehow.
I appreciate everybody's pitching in to keep our Maggie's "product" coming. All I can really do is to recycle old items, due to the lines here at the library machines.
This "miracle material" is simply a one atom thick flake of graphite, but at this nanoscale, graphite takes on exciting properties. Graphene is the strongest material, 200 times stronger than steel, and it is incredibly conductive. It is also very thin. Three million sheets of graphene stacked is just one millimeter high. These properties make graphene highly suited for use in the manufacture of electronic devices
…this survey suggests that extremists make up only a small percentage of American Muslims, but still make up a sufficient number that other American Muslims are worried about them.
We used to think that information is power and that the personal computer enabled lives. But, according to Jaron Lanier, things changed about ten years ago. He cites Apple, Google, and Walmart as some of the reasons….
... "The Apple idea is that instead of the personal computer model where people own their own information, and everybody can be a creator as well as a consumer, we're moving towards this iPad, iPhone model where it's not as adequate for media creation as the real media creation tools, and even though you can become a seller over the network, you have to pass through Apple's gate to accept what you do, and your chances of doing well are very small, and it's not a person to person thing, it's a business through a hub, through Apple to others, and it doesn't create a middle class, it creates a new kind of upper class. ... Google has done something that might even be more destructive of the middle class, which is they've said, "Well, since Moore's law makes computation really cheap, let's just give away the computation, but keep the data." And that's a disaster….
... What Wal-Mart recognized is that information is power, and by using network information, you could consolidate extraordinary power, and so have information about what could be made where, when, what could be moved where, when, who would buy what, when for how much? By coalescing all of that, and reducing the unknowns, they were able to globalize their point of view so they were no longer a local player, but they essentially became their own market, and that's what information can do. The use of networks can turn you from a local player in a larger system into your own global system.
... It can become such a bizarre system. What you have now is a system in which the Internet user becomes the product that is being sold to others, and what the product is, is the ability to be manipulated. It's an anti-liberty system, and I know that the rhetoric around it is very contrary to that.
How will parents react when they find out they will be expected to provide workers' compensation benefits, rest and meal breaks and paid vacation time for…babysitters? Dinner and a movie night may soon become much more complicated.
Assembly Bill 889 (authored by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, will require these protections for all “domestic employees,” including nannies, housekeepers and caregivers.
The bill has already passed the Assembly and is quickly moving through the Senate with blanket support from the Democrat members that control both houses of the Legislature – and without the support of a single Republican member. Assuming the bill will easily clear its last couple of legislative hurdles, AB 889 will soon be on its way to the Governor's desk.
Under AB 889, household “employers” (aka “parents”) who hire a babysitter on a Friday night will be legally obligated to pay at least minimum wage to any sitter over the age of 18 (unless it is a family member), provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to workers' compensation coverage, overtime pay, and a meticulously calculated timecard/paycheck….
Unfortunately, the unreasonable costs and risks contained in this bill will discourage folks from hiring housekeepers, nannies and babysitters and increase the use of institutionalized care rather than allowing children, the sick or elderly to be cared for in their homes. I can't help but wonder if that is the goal of AB 889 – a terrible bill that needs to be stopped.
He was imprisoned November 11, 1942 in German-occupied Poland in Stalag Luft III, of "The Great Escape" fame.Sconiers is the only American yet unrecovered from Stalag Luft III.
If the President’s intention was to win veterans’ votes today in his speech to the American Legion Convention, he failed miserably if the opinions I asked for from attendees are at all representative of veterans who heard the speech. The most common response when I asked folks gathered around the ashtrays and in the hallways after the speech what they thought of it was “He said everything we wanted to hear” but they aren’t convinced that the rhetoric matches the President’s intent.
Get ready for Friday afternoon. You can be sure that the Obama administration will release some bad news that can get lost or overlooked on the Labor Day weekend.
We calculate the present value of state employee pension liabilities using discount rates that reflect the risk of the payments from a taxpayer perspective. If benefits have the same default and recovery characteristics as state general obligation debt, the national total of promised liabilities based on current salary and service is $3.20 trillion. If pensions have higher priority than state debt, the value of liabilities is much larger. Using zero-coupon Treasury yields, which are default-free but contain other priced risks, promised liabilities are $4.43 trillion. Liabilities are even larger under broader concepts that account for salary growth and future service.
…the indictments have not provoked a political earthquake against Hezbollah, as many were hoping, especially as Lebanon's first deadline to apprehend the suspects passed without any substantial repercussion….At the moment, Hezbollah—in addition to its military strength—maintains a solid grip on the Lebanese political system and retains its ability to marginalize the political forces that had been behind the “Cedar Revolution” and the creation of the tribunal.
Here’s a conclusion that follows straight from common sense: Don’t make your incentive scheme the subject of a complex negotiation with a bunch of stakeholders. Keep it simple. Hold people accountable for things they actually have control over, and give them a chance to correct their course along the way. If you discover your rules are lousy—that you made things too easy, or too hard—it’s OK to change them. But never do it in the middle of a game.
Everybody knows that incentives work in real life, but teaching is not exactly real life. How many talented teachers does it take to teach a kid Algebra? One, but the kid has to want to learn.
The first Barn Owl I ever saw was in the headlights swooping low over a marshy field on the North Shore of Long Island. It did, indeed, look spooky in its whiteness.
Barn Owls have a worldwide distribution, but they stay away from the colder regions. In North America, they aren't found much north of southern New England.
Barn Owls are prodigious mouse and rat killers. As such, they are birds of farms and meadows, not of woodlands nor of suburbia. In the Northeast, their numbers were surely higher when the countryside was filled with small farms and cow pastures. Midwestern industrial-scale farming offers them little of interest. I suppose they are the night-time analogue of the Marsh Hawk. The rodents never get a break.
I have never seen or heard one at Maggie's Farm, which would seem to be perfect habitat for them, but which might be towards the northern edge of their range. We even have an open shed with a loft which would be perfect for them to raise a family in. (The Barn Swallows think they own it, though, so maybe they would pester the owls too much.)
The subject of Barn Owls came up because Samizata, of all places, posted a piece on Barn Owl nest boxes. Nobody is going to make a lot of money producing these, but it's a great idea as the wooden barns and silos of the past are falling down.
Bird Dog’s electricity is out due to the hurricane storm, and he can’t pedal fast enough on his tricycle to get enough power to his computer. So, here’s some morning links.
When Beverly Hills residents found out that many of their city’s 950 municipal and public safety employees were earning stunning salaries, 13 weeks of paid vacation, unlimited overtime and other tax-free retirement benefits, taxpayers were outraged and city officials rushed into closed-door sessions to figure out what to do….With a population of 34,000, Beverly Hills has one employee for every 34 residents, the highest ratio in California.
GOOD NEWS:
You did notice the healthy wheat crop, didn’t you?
Specialty Healthcare, in which the board is determining what constitutes an appropriate bargaining unit, is a full-frontal assault on long-established law.With this case, the board is not only trying to discern what is an appropriate bargaining unit within the healthcare setting, it is using the case to apply its interpretation economy-wide.It is expected the board will reach the conclusion that the traditional doctrine of “community of interest” will no longer apply and allow the establishment of “micro-unions.”
These micro-unions could be comprised of as few as two people and effectively cripple an employer’s ability to manage operations in an effective way.Imagine trying to run a manufacturing facility with separate unions representing custodial staff, assemblers, fitters, fabricators, maintenance and others?Each of those bargaining units would have the capacity to shut down production.This isn’t a very efficient model and employers are justifiably worried about having such a model foisted upon them by an un-elected board.
That Irene was grossly over-hyped but, as I predicted, our area has lost power, cable, and phone. It doesn't take much to do that.
When I saw the eyewall disappear, I knew it would be just a stormy day. Took the pup for a walk in it to play in the puddles and flooding waters. Good fun.
I'm posting this from the local library, where everything is working. Lots of folks here using the machines. Will get back to normal posting sched when we all get back up to speed.
General Colin Powell's famous remark about foreign intervention, "If you break it, you own it", also applies to the truth. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, in detail, exposes the blaring untruths by Colin Powell regarding so-called PlameGate, its damage to the Bush White House, and unfair prosecution of Scooter Libby. Colin Powell won't own up to owning his complicity.
I hope I am not boring my readers with all of my posts about the college bubble and the meaninglessness of the current American college degree. From The Case Against the College Degree:
College degrees are poor proof of learning, and perhaps a barrier to it
Students want jobs and respect. Degrees bring both. Employers, meanwhile, want smart, capable workers. A degree is a decent enough proxy for intelligence, but we want it to be more than that. We want degrees to mean that students have learned the foundations of human knowledge literature, chemistry, physics, composition, metaphysics, psychology, economics and so on. If we didn t, we d replace degrees with inexpensive vocational exams.
Charles Murray, a fellow at American Enterprise Institute, calls for just that in a recent book, Real Education. He argues that too many kids who lack the ability to complete a liberal arts education are being pushed into four-year liberal arts schools, because there s a steep societal penalty for not getting a degree. Schools, in turn, have made their degree programs easier. Murray provides a sample of courses that students used to fulfill core degree requirements at major universities in 2004, including History of Comic Book Art (Indiana University), History and Philosophy of Dress (Texas Tech University) and Campus Culture and Drinking (Duke). He documents not only falling standards but rampant grade inflation.
Read the whole thing. He has an interesting suggestion too, but colleges won't go for it. For their own survival, they are committed to their marketing of their expensive credential, whether it means anything or not. In my experience over recent years, it means little-to-nothing.
You used to know what assumptions you could make about somebody with a BA. Not any more. Now, they don't even need to know basic calculus. That's crazy.
Some of my columns here at Maggie's Farm are also carried by Family Security Matters. Last year I wrote a 9/11 column for FSM about what was going on in my life on 9/11, 9/11 With My Son. This year, FSM has produced a moving video for 9/11, and invites anyone to send in their reflections on 9/11 for possible publication. Go here for the video and the invite. I know that Maggie's Farm readers have much to add.
This video is less than 6-minutes long. The US can be virtually energy independent, and cut our trade deficits dramatically, if not even reverse them, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the US. Wonder how? Listen.
A farmer stopped by the local mechanic's shop to have his truck fixed. They couldn't do it while he waited, so he said he didn't live far and would walk home.
On the way home he stopped at the hardware store and bought a bucket and a gallon of paint. He then stopped by the feed store and picked up a couple of chickens and agoose. However, struggling outside the store he now had a problem - how to carry his entire purchases home.
While he was scratching his head he was approached by a little old lady who told him she was lost. She asked 'can you tell me how to get to1603 Mockingbird Lane?'
The farmer said, 'Well, as a matter of fact, my farm is very close to that house. I would walk you there but I can't carry this lot.'
The old lady suggested, 'Why don't you put the can of paint in the bucket. Carry the bucket in one hand, put a chicken under each arm and carry the goose in the other hand?'
'Why thank you very much,' he said and proceeded to walk the old girl home.On the way he says 'Lets take my short cut and go down this alley. We'll be there in no time.'
The little old lady looked over cautiously then said, 'I am a lonely widow without a husband to defend me ... 'How do I know that when we get in the alley you won't hold me up against the wall, pull my skirt, and have your way with me?'
The farmer said, 'Holy smokes lady! I'm carrying a bucket, a gallon of paint, two chickens and a goose. How in the hell could I possibly hold you up against the wall and do that?'
The old lady replied, 'Set the goose down, cover him with the bucket, put the paint on top of the bucket, and I'll hold the chickens.'
Pic above via Drudge, Saturday night. Cabs are running but all public transportation is closed. The BD pupette was evacuated from her Chelsea apartment, worked all day Saturday (as usual), then joined a bunch of friends in Brooklyn Heights for a Hurricane Party and sleepover. That's the third Hurricane Party I have heard about.
Even as many families have climbed out of poverty, some families have plunged deeper into it; as I understand it, mostly those headed by women with severe mental illness, drug and alcohol problems, or personality disorders. Before, if your mother was smoking crack, she could at least still collect her welfare check. Cutting off the check after five years, or cutting benefits as some states did, didn't mean she stopped smoking crack. It just meant there was less money around the house.
Those people are unambiguously worse off since welfare reform.
Ecclesiastes 44:1-15 (NRSV) HYMN IN HONOR OF OUR ANCESTORS
1 Let us now sing the praises of famous men, our ancestors in their generations. 2 The Lord apportioned to them great glory, his majesty from the beginning. 3 There were those who ruled in their kingdoms, and made a name for themselves by their valor; those who gave counsel because they were intelligent; those who spoke in prophetic oracles; 4 those who led the people by their counsels and by their knowledge of the people's lore; they were wise in their words of instruction; 5 those who composed musical tunes, or put verses in writing; 6 rich men endowed with resources, living peacefully in their homes- 7 all these were honored in their generations, and were the pride of their times. 8 Some of them have left behind a name, so that others declare their praise. 9 But of others there is no memory; they have perished as though they had never existed; they have become as though they had never been born, they and their children after them. 10 But these also were godly men, whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten; 11 their wealth will remain with their descendants, and their inheritance with their children's children. 12 Their descendants stand by the covenants; their children also, for their sake. 13 Their offspring will continue forever, and their glory will never be blotted out. 14 Their bodies are buried in peace, but their name lives on generation after generation. 15 The assembly declares their wisdom, and the congregation proclaims their praise.
Reno at First Things looked at the life of Moses from an interesting angle: the multicultural man turned uni-cultural by the hand of God. A quote:
That Irene was grossly over-hyped but, as I predicted, our area has lost power, cable, and phone. It doesn't take much to do that.
I hope I am not boring my readers with all of my posts about the college bubble and the meaninglessness of the current American college degree. From 
A farmer stopped by the local mechanic's shop to have his truck fixed. They couldn't do it while he waited, so he said he didn't live far and would walk home.
