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.
4:13 For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.
4:14 If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void.
4:15 For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.
4:16 For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us,
4:17 as it is written, "I have made you the father of many nations") --in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.
4:18 Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become "the father of many nations," according to what was said, "So numerous shall your descendants be."
4:19 He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb.
4:20 No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God,
4:21 being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.
4:22 Therefore his faith "was reckoned to him as righteousness."
4:23 Now the words, "it was reckoned to him," were written not for his sake alone,
4:24 but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead,
4:25 who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.
And Bob Dylan. Very cool arrangement by Bob - best version of the song I've heard:
I've driven through the Shenandoah Valley a couple of times. Lovely country. Reader wants me to add Van Morrison's version with The Chieftains. Here 'tis:
Sadly, I can't find the video, but a classic SNL skit for the season. One of the best minute and a half seasonal sketches. Belushi was a great talent, unable to tame his demons.
I've seen the embattled winds hurtle together, Uprooting, tossing high and scattering The lush-eared crop; then the onrushing gale With black tornado carry off light stalk And flying stubble. Oft advances huge A host of waters in the sky, and clouds, Gathering from the sea, marshal the storm, Foul, dark with rain. Down pour the heavens sheer, In mighty flood sweeping away glad crops And labours of the ox. The ditches fill: Deep rivers rise in thundering spate: the seas Breathe and boom in the narrows. Jove himself, In blackest darkness of the storm-cloud, wields With flickering hand his bolt, at whose dread shock Earth trembles, wild things scurry, and stark fear Lays prostrate, nation-wide, the hearts of men.
From A Farmer's Calendar, 40 BC. (You can spell Vergilius' name as Vergil or Virgil)
The main drag on the isola is an alley (pic from a couple of years ago). Our advice in Italty: Never eat the pizza. Terrible stuff. Sit down someplace and grab a gelato and a tiny coffee instead. Hazelnut gelato is my favorite.
Last night, I helped my son prepare an Op-Ed piece for his high school class on Economics and Financial Literacy. He chose the Durable Goods report, and we sat down to dissect and discuss what it told us. As a neophyte, he naturally saw discussion of "Shipments rising" and "Orders increasing" and asked "this means things are getting better, right? We're in an uptrend?" Linear thinking is easy. Being human, we do it all the time.
Yes, I told him, but there's much more to the report. I pointed out that Inventories were growing rapidly, Unfilled Orders were increasing, and while Shipments were increasing, the rate of increase was slowing. None of these are particularly good signs of future activity. More importantly, Capital Goods, the building blocks of future productivity, were declining. At best, we decided, the report was neutral, showing that things may have improved somewhat, but many other signs were indicating a stall or slowdown.
Most importantly, I pointed him to the Inventory-to-Sales Ratio, which is a harbinger of true economic activity. A rapidly climbing ratio does not forebode good times, but rather difficulty with pricing and sales in the future. As consumers, we rarely pay attention to what goes on 'behind the veil' with items like inventories. We like our answers pat, easy and predictable. It's a shame they never are.
The case for rewarding performance is that we can do it, not that it is the same as rewarding merit. Likewise, holding individuals personally responsible for the consequences of their own actions is a social expedient for prospective control, not a cosmic retrospective moral judgment.
When I was young I affected to believe that to look a mess was a sign of inner profundity. I made the mistake of supposing that if the wise are bearded, the bearded are wise. If I adopted the supposed manner of an artist, therefore, I too would be an artist, or at least artistic. And, conveniently enough, the sloppiness of inner profundity required no effort on my part. As everyone knows, a lot of human history consists of man’s attempt to escape effort.
Here at Maggie's, we might be termed "skeptics" but, when it comes to climate, we're really of the "Who cares?" school more than anything else. (Of course, worrying about the next Ice Age and its effects on real estate values does keep us up at night.)
Best summary I have seen of The Skeptics' Case, presented in a way that even non-scientists can easily follow.
I think of them as the nighttime version of the Marsh Hawk, because they like the wide open spaces, grasslands, fields, and marsh edges. They are not woodland birds.
I know we do not have them at the farm, because we have a hundred acres of meadow and a perfect barn loft open for them to use, and they have never used it. Plus there are hundreds more acres of horse field and cow pasture nearby. I think we're at the northern edge of their range. For owls, we have only Great Horned, Barred, and Screech as far as I know. Probably Saw-Whet in winter, but I haven't seen one there.
The last time I saw a Barn Owl was when one flew across the road in front of me at night in the headlights, between a marsh and some large estate fields in lovely Lloyd Harbor, Long Island. Lloyd Neck, actually.
Breitbart was a new media pioneer and hero. God bless him.
A comment from his family's announcement: "Andrew lived boldly, so that we more timid souls would dare to live freely and fully, and fight for the fragile liberty he showed us how to love."
From Heather MacDonald's review of The City That Become Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control, It's the Cops, Stupid!
A quote:
New York’s safety surge torpedoes all conventional understandings about crime. To be sure, the country as a whole experienced its own record-breaking crime drop in the 1990s, but New York’s crime freefall was twice as steep—80 percent, as opposed to 40 percent—and lasted twice as long. Whereas America’s crime decline stalled in the 2000s, New York’s continued, cementing Gotham’s previously unimaginable status as the safest big city in the country.
You might think that criminologists would have flocked to New York to study how such a paradigm-shattering development happened. Instead, for the last decade and a half, the criminology profession has tried to look the other way. A favorite criminological pursuit in the 1990s was finding cities that equaled New York’s crime decline on a single front—homicide, say—in order to diminish the significance of what was happening in the nation’s largest city. San Diego and Boston were favorites of New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield and his professional sources, no matter how wildly different those localities’ demographics and overall crime rates were from New York’s. When, by the late ’90s, the crime drop in the rival cities had petered out or, as in the case of Boston, reversed itself, the profession lost interest in New York entirely. The city, after all, had two counts against it: it was presided over by a crusading Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, who was targeting New York’s welfare culture as well as its violence and disorder, and all early indications suggested that responsibility for the crime decline lay with the newly focused, assertive tactics coming out of the New York Police Department.
Read the whole thing. I suspect that one reason NYC's success (and it is palpable when you visit these days) is not widely imitated in the big urban areas is because it doesn't fit Blue Social Theory. Blue Social Theory wants to deal with the "root causes of crime," when we already know the cause of crime is people - often bad people or addicts - behaving badly.
Whoever wrote President Obama’s speech at a dinner last night to honor Iraq War veterans did an excellent job of highlighting the vets’ qualities and their lessons to all Americans. (Emphasis added) However, it is praise that is election year hypocrisy:
Seems to me that downtown Nashville had a great opportunity to eliminate all zoning, and see what happened. People might actually, with freedom, provide things that people want. After all, the government, in its infinite planning wisdom, razed almost the entire historic downtown in "urban renewal," aka "urban death."
Yep. Just a question of whether free markets, or politicians, or dictators, or oligopolies control it and its movement. As a freedom-oriented person, I prefer free markets as the best representation of human interests.
In 1995, shortly after it was privatized, only 16 million people used the Internet world-wide. By 2011, more than two billion were online—and that number is growing by as much as half a million every day. This explosive growth is the direct result of governments generally keeping their hands off the Internet sphere.
Net access, especially through mobile devices, is improving the human condition more quickly—and more fundamentally—than any other technology in history. Nowhere is this more true than in the developing world, where unfettered Internet technologies are expanding economies and raising living standards.
The UN regulations sound to me like a solution in search of a problem, and that's one thing organizations excel at.
We are giving them free stuff so they don't threaten us with nukes? Is that called "foreign policy"? I term it blackmail. They have no food because of their own psychotic policies. Aid only prolongs their control.
Breitbart's book: 
I think of them as the nighttime version of the Marsh Hawk, because they like the wide open spaces, grasslands, fields, and marsh edges. They are not woodland birds.