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.
A preview performance of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard at Classic Stage. Is Cherry Orchard the first modernist play? Some say it is. Plenty of ellipses, and disjointed communication. A comedy, sort-of, or a slice of life. Chekhov was a physician, a writer on the side.
Superb early dinner at the Blue Water Grill on Union Square. Mrs. BD had the Crab and Sweet Potato Hash. I had the Baked Cod with Lobster Mashed Potatoes. I didn;t pay attention to what our friends had. We had a jolly afternoon and evening in NYC. Blue Water is a Maggie's 4-star joint, especially for seafood. Perfect ambience, service, and food. I prefer the balcony, but there's more people-watching on the main floor. Their pic below:
I didn't want to use flash:
Took the subway, of course. Quicker and cheaper. The NYC subway system is a good IQ test, and a small d democratic form of transportation in the best sense. I have always enjoyed the subways. The whole thing was developed by separate private companies to meet market demaind, not by government planners. Works great, once you get the hang of it. The government took it all over, but I don't know why. Governments always have reasons to take things over, and it's usually all about money or votes.
14th St was hopping. Gotta love the vitality of a thriving, bustling city full of young, hard-working, ambitious, determined, and attractive people. That's the Empire State bldg lit up in the distance:
I realize that some of our readers own more firearms than can be easily listed (obsessional collectors, with too much money), but some just own a few.
I don't collect firearms, but I have two friends who are serious collectors, with hundreds of functional and valuable antiques of all sorts.
I have an ugly Savage 110, a Glock 9 mm (and a carry permit), a pile of old .22s, one lovely old Abercrombie & Fitch 20 ga s/s for grouse and woodock, a pretty Belgian Browning 12 ga o/u which I use for clays, a Rem 12 ga semiauto for deer, turkey, ducks and geese, and a few other nice old field shotguns in the back of the closet which I can't remember. I don't go for fancy: guns are tools, meant to be used and banged around.
I was all enthused about this afternoon's debate because of its different style and fewer participants until I saw a link this morning to an article on American Thinker, a highly-respected right-wing blog site, and read Prepare Yourself for Obama's Second Term, a thorough and persuasive demolition of the GOP's chances.
So I guess we should call this the "Why bother?" debate. Because, let's face it, according to the above article, we're just wasting our time, and it would be a lot better and healthier for the nation as a whole to simply give up now and concede the election. I'm sure this national feeling of peace and harmony was at the forefront of the writer's mind, and possibly those who linked to it. What's four more short years of Obama compared to how an impassioned and contentious election would tear the nation apart? It's nice to see that someone out there is looking at the bigger picture and seeing what we little people don't.
Nevertheless, I guess I'll dourly plunder on with this post. Haven't got anything better to write about at the moment.
This afternoon's dour waste of everyone's time is brought to you by 'family' groups, such as Family Leader and the National Organization for Marriage.
"This is not a debate," dourly said Bob Vander Plaats, President and CEO of The FAMiLY LEADER. "Our meaningless purpose is simply to learn about their dour worldviews and to listen to their dour hearts on key family issues. The discussion will allow us to see a more personal side of the dour and meaningless candidates."
(I edited the above quote a bit to bring it up to modern standards.)
I dourly note that neither Romney or Huntsman will be participating. What might make the event interesting, albeit in a dour and meaningless way, is that it's being touted as a 'forum', rather than a 'debate', so that should be fun to see, even if it is a total waste of everyone's time.
The good news is that you won't lose any of your valuable TV time as it's only being streamed via the miracle of the World Wide Web. Better yet, it's on at a grossly early 5 pm EST, so hopefully the entire nation will be too busy to watch this inconsequential pile of platitudes leading up to a foregone election.
Update: I meaninglessly just spotted that the sponsor site says "64 television stations will carry either live or delayed broadcasts" so check your local listings, although I doubt any station carrying it would bother mentioning it.
Again, I think the nation as a whole owes a debt of gratitude to American Thinker and their clear understanding of our hopeless chances (as well as those who linked to their fine piece) and, like the way global warming is finally dead, so, too, is this election, and I'm sure we've all got more important things to do than stare at some stupid computer in the middle of a beautiful Saturday afternoon when we should be out there living life to its fullest and doing important things, like cleaning the garage and washing the car.
Or, you could completely disregard the article's defeatist message and approach this afternoon's event with the same zeal and enthusiasm with which you've approached the others in our determined effort to get this horseshit socialist out of the White House.
The planners like their project and speak well of it; that is enough to get a lengthy, heavy breathing puff job (hardened newspaper people would use a phrase in place of that one that is unsuitable in a family friendly blog like Via Meadia) in the New York Times. Only an idiot or a propagandist would write such a piece; it is hard to see how any editor would put it in print.
Just down the road from where the Pilgrims first landed in Provincetown. A house in town, downtown Wellfleet. I'd happily live, and raise some American bambinos, in this one had there been any work there - which there is not. As you can discern from my pics, Wellfleet ain't Nantucket. It's always a little raggedy, which is what I like.
I'd like to thank my teens for pointing out to me that pizza has been declared a vegetable by Congress.
Years ago, the Reagan administration received abuse for suggesting ketchup was a vegetable. Now we have Congress actually voting on this stuff?
At a point in time where the government could be shut down almost weekly, is nearly bankrupt and the Super Committee can't help forge agreement, we can agree that pizza is a vegetable.
Tomatoes, of course, are a fruit. So pizza should be a fruit, not a vegetable. Since they can't even get that right, it's probably no surprise Congress can't come to a reasonable agreement on the budget.
I'm not inclined to believe conspiracy theories, and the thought that Jon Corzine would comply with something along these lines seems absurd. But Jon is very well connected and does have an interest in maintaining the strong link between the government and Wall Street. That link, however, is starting to show signs of wear. Between Tea Partiers and OWS complaining about crony capitalism, and the fact that market rigging only lasts so long before it collapses on itself, we may well be seeing the end stages of the game being played out.
From that standpoint, a 'hit' on MF Global would make perfect sense. It's true that even in the best economic conditions, speculators are viewed as evil. The balance they bring to prices and markets, as well as the liquidity they provide, are overlooked because they operate in a realm many people simply don't understand. As a result, there is a belief that somehow speculators 'control' market outcomes. Nothing is further from the truth, but it is a widely held concept.
Did the Fed want to see some pressure taken off upward price movements? Yes. Will this help? Yes. Does this undermine markets further? Yes. Does this increase the uncertainty which is keeping our economy from moving forward? Yes.
We can ask many other questions, but none will answer whether or not this was a hatchet job. My guess? It wasn't, it was just mismanagement. But there is an awful stench coming from this whole affair.
Palin: How Congress Occupied Wall Street - Politicians who arrive in Washington as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires. Why?
And this: Damn It Feels Good to be a Banker. I'd rather be a kick-ass banker than a Consultant - or an OWS lowlife, but really do not wish to be any of those things:
As states send more and more mediocre students to college, students learn less and less. “Our colleges and universities are full to the brim with students who do not really belong there, who are unprepared for college and uninterested in breaking a mental sweat.” “Nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges don’t make academics a priority,” according to a widely-publicized January report from experts like New York University Professor Richard Arum.
While Italy is bickering over just how inhumane it is to raise the retirement age by 2 years in a 15 year span (which works out to a whopping 48 days per year) and will likely lead to mass riots and bloodshed in Rome before the idea is ultimately scrapped, things in America's own back yard, the country that now that the EFSF is finished will have no choice but to come to Europe's rescue via the IMF, are looking horrendous to quite horrendous. In fact when it comes to retirement, 80 is, we are sad to say, the new 65, at least according to Wells Fargo. And with average life expectancy in the US peaking at 78.1, it means that the typical American will have to work for an additional 2 years after death to pay for not only not having any retirement savings (thank you Bernanke ZIRP and VIX>30 stock market), but to make sure Europeans have theirs. You think we jest? Nope.
Read the whole thing. Years of cheap money, the housing bubble, and other bubbles resulted in a 20-year party built on credit and spending. (Of course, governments did the same thing.) Although most people continue to work after retirement, it is more pleasant when it is semi-optional.
On the other hand, if you spend most of your life drearily putting money into savings instead of living, you will get sick before you ever have a life with some fun and adventure in it. Sailing in the Med, fly fishing in Patagonia, hunting Ptarmigan in Alaska, cruising around the world, riding horses in Montana, golfing in Scotland - none of these things are (yes, "none" takes a plural verb) much fun to do when deaf, half blind, and with a colostomy bag, two bad knees, and a touch of dementia.
Honestly, I'd rather be working with the latter and have some of my fun in advance. Buy now, pay later. Health, like youth, is wasted on the young, and idleness wasted on the old. During my two years of zombie working, I'd like to be a WalMart greeter, just adding some good cheer to the world for a humble wage.
As an old-fashioned person, I always claim, whenever I do something wrong (and I do), "The Devil made me do it."
At the same time that I mean that, I also accept the notion of human agency. Every waking second of life offers choices, and I think a college bs post about Free Will would be sophomoric. All I will say is that what we feel, and how we chose to behave (absent severe mental illness) are entirely different things. Human dignity and civilization itself requires a distance and a delay between the two. Even animals exercise that delay.
A human without a reliably moral, executive "I" is a dangerous entity, an entity to be avoided if not locked away.
"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."
In Scientific American, The Wipeout Gene - A new breed of genetically modified mosquitoes carries a gene that cripples its own offspring. They could crush native mosquito populations and block the spread of disease. And they are already in the air—though that's been a secret.
Good, bad, or indifferent? It's a little creepy to me, like Ice-9.
Has individual liberty been a prime value in American politics and policy since Coolidge? (We are defining liberty as freedom from the power and interference of the state.)
Do Americans talk liberty, but desire utilitariansm? Is real freedom too difficult or scarey for most people nowadays?
Secondly, three guys including Will Wilkinson discuss Libertarianism and Liberty in serious depth at Boston Review. At Maggie's, we believe that the "liberty cost" has to be a large factor in any policy equation, or else we aren't America anymore.
Today, you hear more about financial cost, health cost, and environmental cost, than about liberty cost. (Can I trademark the term "liberty cost," or has somebody else done that already?)
Seems to me that Repubs talk more liberty than the Dems, who have eliminated it from their political calculus since Woodrow Wilson. However, the Repubs talk it better than they act it. Have pols simply learned that, when it comes to voting, people want stuff more from the feds than they want freedom?
We have been warned that the world is in for a long period of deleveraging from debt-driven economies. This via Zero Hedge:
This is not a bump in the road; it is the exhaustion of the entire model of growth that we have depended on for the past 30 years. Once the debt saturation point has been reached, adding more debt subtracts from the economy rather than adds to it. This is reflected in the decline of employment by every metric: total number of jobs, civilian participation, payrolls per capita, and employment as a percentage of the total population.
We are past the point of debt saturation, and so we need a new model of employment, and indeed of “growth” itself. Sadly, as discussed in a recent report, the Status Quo financial witch-doctors have only prescribed more debt and more unproductive friction.
What the researchers omitted, as they went on to explain in the rest of the paper, was just how many variables they poked and prodded before sheer chance threw up a headline-making result—a clearly false headline-making result.
The odds of statistical bogosity grow when researchers don't have to report all the ways they manipulated their data in exploratory fashion. For example, the researchers "used father's age to control for baseline age across participants," thereby fudging the subjects' actual ages. They factored in lots of completely irrelevant data. And, rather than establish from the outset how many subjects they would test, they tested until they obtained the false result.
The authors of that provocative paper were Joseph P. Simmons and Uri Simonsohn of the University of Pennsylvania, and Leif D. Nelson of the University of California at Berkeley. "Many of us," they wrote—"and this includes the three authors of this article"—end up "yielding to the pressure to do whatever is justifiable to compile a set of studies that we can publish. This is driven not by a willingness to deceive but by the self-serving interpretation of ambiguity. ... "
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo. Time lapse sequences of photographs taken by Ron Garan, Satoshi Furukawa and the crew of expeditions 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011, who shot these pictures at an altitude of around 350 km.
Shooting locations in order of appearance:
1. Aurora Borealis Pass over the United States at Night 2. Aurora Borealis and eastern United States at Night 3. Aurora Australis from Madagascar to southwest of Australia 4. Aurora Australis south of Australia 5. Northwest coast of United States to Central South America at Night 6. Aurora Australis from the Southern to the Northern Pacific Ocean 7. Halfway around the World 8. Night Pass over Central Africa and the Middle East 9. Evening Pass over the Sahara Desert and the Middle East 10. Pass over Canada and Central United States at Night 11. Pass over Southern California to Hudson Bay 12. Islands in the Philippine Sea at Night 13. Pass over Eastern Asia to Philippine Sea and Guam 14. Views of the Mideast at Night 15. Night Pass over Mediterranean Sea 16. Aurora Borealis and the United States at Night 17. Aurora Australis over Indian Ocean 18. Eastern Europe to Southeastern Asia at Night
"And the centerfielder's going back... back... Home run, Team Republican!"
Sorry, just getting in the mood.
With this extraordinarily long lull between debates (an entire week), I thought I'd step back and take a fresh look at things. Armed with the very latest in caffeine-fortified psychotropic drugs and a Jack Daniels I.V. drip, I'm prepared to take on such challenging questions as, "Does bra size matter in a presidential race?", and "Would you vote for someone with an opposing astrological sign?" That's why Maggie hired me, to take on tough, penetrating questions like these that no other blogger dares address.
By the way, I had a rare insight while writing this post and have resolved not to say too many scornful, derisive, abusive, reprehensible things about Ron Paul ever again. So that's good news for our Ron Paul fan(s) out there.
Thus you see, he is a Composition of Whim, Affectation, Wickedness, Vanity, and Inquietude, with a very small, if any Ingredient of Madness. … The ruling Qualities abovementioned, together with Ingratitude, Ferocity, and Lying, I need not mention, Eloquence and Invention, form the whole of the Composition
The rising cost of medical care comes from advanced, expensive technology (almost all created in the US), advanced expensive pharmacology, costs of malpractice insurance and absurdly excess expenditures to avoid lawsuits, and medical insurance and government insurance-subsidies for all medical care. Given all of the above things not changing anytime soon, the only way to control costs is bureaucratic rationing - which will entail the politicizing of any medical care which is covered by insurance. And that is a very bad idea, too. I see a future for medical care outside the entire insurance nexus.
Had I been a young, junior kid on the staff, I'm sure I would have done what McQueary did. Chain of authority. Had I been in Paterno's shoes, probably what he did: chain of authority. Arguably ethically wrong, but natural. (Update: I may not be well-informed about what was witnessed.)
A beautifully-restored turn-of-the-century summer "cottage" on the CT shore. These sorts of places originally had no central heat as they were indeed summer get-aways for prosperous New Yorkers, but they had plenty of coal fireplaces to take the chill off on cool summer or fall nights.
Third floor, as in most larger, pre-income tax era houses, was servants' quarters.
Very nice carriage barn too, with room upstairs for your chauffeur or gardener. In those days, there were tons of secure jobs for semi-skilled servants.
I realize that some of our readers own more firearms than can be easily listed (obsessional collectors, with too much money), but some just own a few.
Multidisciplinary team of researchers develop 
Politely 
That good old toon is via 
