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.
We posted earlier on our side trip by train into Lombardy and Lake Como, via Milan, and our visit to Villa Carlotta. This area was historically famous for its silk (which Smithsonian Magazinefeatured this month), its picturesque villages, and for its villas and gardens. Today, we will finish that day's journey up with a bit of Como and Bellagio. Some consider Bellagio the most lovely town in Europe, but I think it has tons of competition for that title.
Here's my shot of a view of Lake Como from Villa Melzi (built around 1808) in Bellagio:
Seems to me people vary enormously in their determination to make wise decisions - and in their willingness to take responsibility for their bad decisions
A near horizon whose sharp jags Cut brutally into a sky Of leaden heaviness, and crags Of houses lift their masonry Ugly and foul, and chimneys lie And snort, outlined against the gray Of lowhung cloud. I hear the sigh The goaded city gives, not day Nor night can ease her heart, her anguished labours stay.
Below, straight streets, monotonous, From north and south, from east and west, Stretch glittering; and luminous Above, one tower tops the rest And holds aloft man's constant quest: Time! Joyless emblem of the greed Of millions, robber of the best Which earth can give, the vulgar creed Has seared upon the night its flaming ruthless screed.
O Night! Whose soothing presence brings The quiet shining of the stars. O Night! Whose cloak of darkness clings So intimately close that scars Are hid from our own eyes. Beggars By day, our wealth is having night To burn our souls before altars Dim and tree-shadowed, where the light Is shed from a young moon, mysteriously bright.
Where art thou hiding, where thy peace? This is the hour, but thou art not. Will waking tumult never cease? Hast thou thy votary forgot? Nature forsakes this man-begot And festering wilderness, and now The long still hours are here, no jot Of dear communing do I know; Instead the glaring, man-filled city groans below!
The delightful football hero and Congressman J C Watts is filling in for Sean this afternoon. Great to hear him again. This good guy quit politics to return to his Pastor job.
That's a big "Duh" from me, because, in cloud-cuckoo land, money just grows on trees and all you have to do is to harvest the excess from the undeserving lucky. This only goes to confirm the shrewd post from Powerline the other day.
Problem is, the numbers of those undeserving lucky are shrinking rapidly in this Obama economy. So who pays? And who hires?
Honey, while you're up, get me a Laphroaig please, while I contemplate the Dems' plans to go after assets - before death - instead of only income.
The excesses of ancient Athenian democracy and its near destruction at the hands of Sparta made the founders particularly wary of direct democracies, which as James Madison wrote, "have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." By empowering people no matter how lacking in virtue, character, or knowledge, democracy gives greater scope to their irrational appetites, leaving them vulnerable to factional strife or the demagogue who promises them the gratification of their desires at the expense of freedom and political order. Then democracy becomes "ochlocracy," a "mob rule" that descends into tyranny:
"For the mob," Polybius writes, "habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors, as soon as it has got a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring, being excluded by poverty from the sweets of civil honors, produces a reign of mere violence. Then come tumultuous assemblies, massacres, banishments, redivisions of land; until, after losing all trace of civilization, it has once more found a master and a despot."
Though this may seem like a dusty political philosophy lesson, remember that the United States has evolved perilously close to the sort of direct democracy that would have horrified the founders.
Not from The Onion - from NASA (correction - not exactly NASA itself but NASA-affiliated scientists): Rising greenhouse emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report.
So now we have the boy who cried "Aliens!" You really just have to laugh and, anyhow, I kinda like aliens. Bring 'em on!
Fiddler crabs check out at least 100 potential mates before making a decision. While we acknowledge that figuring out how to get along with difficult people is a big part of marriage, how can it hurt to decide carefully - even though it's guaranteed that you will end up with a flawed human - or crab? (Hopefully, not with crabs.)
I didn't realize we have three species on the East coast. I guess I am mainly familiar with the ubiquitous and delightful Atlantic Marsh Fiddler of the Cape Cod salt marshes and tidal flats. It always cheers me up to see them.
These cute mud-eating crabs with their little holes all over the high tidal mudflats are all bark and no bite, have gills but breathe air, do not make good bait, and live in colonies in which they seem to spend most of their time threatening eachother. At high tide, they retreat into their burrows and shut the door. Up here, they hibernate down there all winter.
Name the two species, and explain what is happening:
Ans: Yes, it is a King Snake constricting and preparing to devour a venomous Copperhead. It will take him quite a while to get that big Copperhead into himself, but he'll do it. Snakes stretch.
President Obama's Magical Misery Tour million-dollar bus hit an outhouse on Wednesday. A farmer complained about the complexity of agricultural regulations.
Obama’s advice was simple: “Contact USDA.” “Talk to them directly. Find out what it is that you’re concerned about,” Obama told the man. “My suspicion is, a lot of times, they’re going to be able to answer your questions and it will turn out that some of your fears are unfounded.”
The reporter for Politico tried to take the president's advice. Nine phone calls later, over two days, being bounced from one organization to another, guess what: NO ANSWER. Politico experiences that the president is only good for manure in farm country, as in the rest of the country.
The Associated Press reports President Obama has figured out what to do about the unemployment problem, and you're going to want to sit down before we tell you. Ready? OK, here goes:
He's going to give a "major speech."
Wait, there's more! The Los Angeles Times reports that he's already "daring Republicans to block" the "job-creation package" he has yet to devise.
"Dare them to block it"? Is this Kindergarten? Everybody knows what things the economy needs to be unleashed, but the Dems will never do them.
Actual writings from hospital patient charts (medical transcription people are not perfect, nor is docs' handwriting):
1. The patient refused autopsy. 2. The patient has no previous history of suicides. 3. Patient has left white blood cells at another hospital. 4. She has no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband states she was very hot in bed last night. 5. Patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year. 6. On the second day the knee was better, and on the third day it disappeared. 7. The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to be depressed. 8. The patient has been depressed since she began seeing me in 1993. 9. Discharge status: Alive but without permission. 10. Healthy appearing decrepit 69-year old male, mentally alert but forgetful. 11. Patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch. 12. She is numb from her toes down. 13. While in ER, she was examined, x-rated and sent home. 14. The skin was moist and dry. 15. Occasional, constant infrequent headaches. 16. Patient was alert and unresponsive. 17. Rectal examination revealed a normal size thyroid. 18. She stated that she had been constipated for most of her life, until she got a divorce. 19. I saw your patient today, who is still under our car for physical therapy. 20. Both breasts are equal and reactive to light and accommodation. 21. Examination of genitalia reveals that he is circus sized. 22. The lab test indicated abnormal lover function. 23. Skin: somewhat pale but present. 24. The pelvic exam will be done later on the floor. 25. Patient has two teenage children, but no other abnormalities.
If you are a carnivore, like the rest of us Maggie's Farmers, you've seen the prices rise as corn goes in gas tanks rather than gassing us up, and you've seen new names on cuts of beef at the market. So, here's a handy interactive site where you can get descriptions of all the cuts of beef and cooking tips.
From the Barrister, laptopping it in by the pool this week, ceegar in hand.
John F. Kennedy did not say "Ask first what your country can do for you," but that's where Liberal/Socialist politics have taken us. Such politics appeal to our weakest, most dependent tendencies, weaken the spirit of the people, and have the wanted, or unintended, effect of making all dependents and/or serfs of the Almighty State.
In a sense, we are all complicit, because almost everybody has something they want the Federal government to do, or to do more of, with their neighbors' money. People want their Medicare and their Social Security and their US Armed Forces and their national forests, interstate highways, and other things too.
A short while ago, Arnold Kling wrote a good piece about the growth industries in Western countries, especially the US. I cannot find that link right now.
They turn out to be Government, Education, and Health Care. I find it illuminating to view these sectors of life as industries: consumer-oriented service industries, largely unproductive, with the first two pandering to and trying to manipulate their customers and the third, well, in flux but it actually does produce things: artificial knees, medicines, treatments, stents for my friends, etc. - things that might help people be productive and independent.
All three have brilliant, expensive marketing machines - and all three are heavily subsidized if not totally paid for by the taxpayer. Who is paying the bills for these subsidies now? The Chinese - the reason we were supposed to eat our spinach as kids. They are paying those bills. We owe them, big time.
Or do they own us? Think about it: Chinese people are paying for our Medicare and our "stimuli"... It is pathetic.
Listening to someone means accepting the idea that there are things you don't know, and things you may be wrong about. That's hard to do when you're working from a philosophy that insists problems can be solved by following a rigid social or economic plan from a tenured academic. Why would you listen to someone who doesn't even have a PhD and is several social classes below you? Instead you smile patiently while he's talking and then explain to him why he's wrong. And it that doesn't work, you pretend to agree with him, while explaining that both of you actually share the same agenda. Your agenda.
The left does this over and over again-- and then doesn't understand why it's reviled for it. Three years ago it sold the same totalitarian rubbish, the bad economics and meaningless slogans by passing it off as a messianic event that would transform all of human history.
Now the failed messiah and his million dollar buses are trying to salvage the disaster. And yet even staring into the face of the economic apocalypse, the misery they inflicted on so many, and the fall of the national economy-- all they can do is mumble about bad luck and pass off the same bad policies as a bold new approach to saving the economy.
People are hurting out there, and it is because the government has gotten in their way. People are fearful of what the government plans to do to them, and to their businesses, next. My take is that the entire US economy is holding its breath until 2013. In the meantime, people will hunker down and try to survive the economic plague.
For a person with New Urbanist (or Old Urbanist) leanings, a visit to Seaside feels a bit like a pilgrimage to a sacred site. Although the merits of the town have been debated for years, its significance in the history of American urban planning is undeniable.
May we take some solace in finally hoping that even hard-line leftists like Mr. Klein have belatedly seen the glaring light? Now he admits that community action programs such as Head Start are "little more than patronage troughs for local Democrat Party honchos ... far more adept at dispensing make-work jobs than mastering the subtle nuances of early education."
Jeff Greenfield is shocked, horrified. Thomas Jefferson would not be: "That government which governs least, governs best." This is The Great American Debate: Freebies vs. Freedom.
If Stockman is right - and he is no fool - the O Admin and the Dems have, wittingly or unwittingly, set an ugly trap for America for the next decade at least. Nobody is amused by the O's glib pronouncements anymore.
...the administration’s mantra was “never let a crisis go to waste.”Obama saw economic decline as an opportunity to pave the way for socialized medicine, to enact a near-trillion-dollar payoff to public sector unions in the guise of “stimulus,” and to extend the government’s control over various sectors of industry.
I think Obama and his advisers were genuinely surprised, not that their policies didn’t bring about economic recovery–they couldn’t have expected that–but that recovery didn’t happen of its own accord. That is why they are so nonplussed today. They never actually believed that Obamacare, bailouts, “stimulus” and so on would help the economy, so they know the answer now is not more of the same.
Government is all about money these days. American governance was not always that way, but it has been for 100 years, and that's the good reason that politics is more about money than anything else. This is Stossel (h/t SDA):
Has it struck EVERYBODY as absolutely fascinating that difference between the squares of consecutive integers equals the sum of those two integers?
Naturally, it must also have struck everybody – well, maybe not exactly everybody – that the series formed by differences of the squares of consecutive integers is, therefore, simply a series made up of consecutive odd numbers.
If neither of these has struck you, it may be because you have not been stuck, without a book, waiting in long line to get to a bathroom.
In 2005, Aron teamed up with some neurologists and with Helen Fisher, the biologicalanthropologist who devised the questionnaire used to match people on Chemistry.com, a division of Match.com, to conduct a series of experiments. The first experiment placed happily-inlove people in an fMRI scanner to take photos of their brains. They found neural activation in areas of the brain linked with reward, excitement, and euphoria. Aron says this is likely indicative of early-stage love. Over time, the activation in this reward area can diminish. The car runs out of gas.
The processes that keep people together take place elsewhere in the brain. It’s a trait we share with only a few other animals, like the prairie vole.
and
We think of heartbreak as metaphoric, but the body actually does respond to emotional trauma, releasing a flood of stress chemicals like adrenaline that, in some cases, can overwhelm even an otherwise healthy person and cause his or her heart to spasm. Broken heart syndrome, as it’s colloquially known, has been tracked at the nation’s leading heart clinics since 2005, but because its symptoms look so similar to those of a heart attack, it is often misdiagnosed, says Ilan Wittstein, an assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins Heart Institute and the lead author of a New England Journal of Medicine article first describing the syndrome.
So why do colleges admit these kids? Because they need the money and the warm bodies. It's an industry now. Low-tier colleges around here will take anybody who applies, and they will never flunk you out because they want the income.
I agree with Mead here. And I do not blame the high schools at all. I do not blame the kids either, who are neither academically ambitious, don't want to spend the money, or who just don't have what it takes but are happy to take 4 years of partying and extended avoidance of adulthood.
Furthermore, I believe that many "college-ready" kids should not bother. 12 years of education ought to be a good enough start for anybody who was paying attention. American high schools offer everything anybody might want or need, but they can't make anybody take what they offer.
I think lots of kids, especially boys, just want to learn how to do something practical as soon as they can. Most people are not natural scholars, and many natural scholars never went to college either.
I suspect something around 5% of kids can make good use of higher ed. If people really want education, you can tell, because they make great efforts to educate themselves in their spare time. If they don't do that, I'd have doubts about whether they are really suited for higher ed of the liberal arts type.
How responsible are people
New York at Night
With advice for singles:
Sippican's 
Taranto: The Five Stages of Obama - 
If you are a carnivore, like the rest of us Maggie's Farmers, you've seen the prices rise as corn goes in gas tanks rather than gassing us up, and you've seen new names on cuts of beef at the market. So, here's a handy 
John F. Kennedy did not say "Ask first what your country can do for you," but that's where Liberal/Socialist politics have taken us. Such politics appeal to our weakest, most dependent tendencies, weaken the spirit of the people, and have the wanted, or unintended, effect of making all dependents and/or serfs of the Almighty State. 
From the admirable Sultan's 
The right way 
We all have them, and have had them.