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.
It includes some good, friendly discussion of social equality vs. economic equality, and of economic mobility which I see as one of the wonders of American society.
Here's one bit from Voegli, speaking to Noah:
I close by remarking on your wistfulness about the absence of internal radicals or external Communists who might prod us to equalize incomes. It is in keeping with your hopes, now certainly flagging, that Occupy Wall Street would catalyze a politically irresistible redistributive movement. In your book's final sentence-"The worst thing we could do to the Great Divergence is get used to it" - you are trying to say something to the Americans indifferent to that great crusade. But perhaps they, in their reluctance to enlist, are trying to say something to you about their abiding desire for economic vigor and absolute mobility, and their abiding fears about the power and decency of redistributive government.
The average US income, per person, in 2011 was about $45,000. Make that an income cap, with anything above taxed at 100%. As a start, I suggest that this example of equality begin with Washington politicians and federal employees. It might catch on.
Why stop with income? Let's address assets too, which are much more important for economic equality. The average American's net worth in 2011 was $77,000. Let's bring the pols and bureaucrats down to that too, and take the rest away from them for equality and the Common Good. Bernanke, too, and Obama, Harry Reid, John Kerry, The Clintons, Elizabeth Warren, etc. Maybe throw in Krugman, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates just for giggles, and confiscate all trusts.
I suggest that the same apply to the owners and staff of The New Republic and The NY Times. If it requires force, so be it.
For my plan to work, obviously the government will need to set the prices of everything because otherwise nobody could afford stuff. Hey - it might just work!
A mid-air collision on February 1, 1943, between a B-17 and a German fighter over the Tunis dock area, became the subject of one of the most famous photographs of World War II.
A woman in a supermarket is following a grandfather and his badly behaved 3-year-old grandson. It's obvious to her that he has his hands full with the child screaming for sweets in the sweet aisle, biscuits in the biscuit aisle, and for fruit, cereal and pop in the other aisles. Meanwhile, Granddad is working his way around, saying in a controlled voice, "Easy, William, we won't be long, easy, boy." Another outburst, and she hears the granddad calmly say, "It's okay, William, just a couple more minutes and we'll be out of here. Hang in there, boy." At the checkout, the little terror is throwing items out of the cart, and Granddad says again in a controlled voice, "William, William, relax buddy, don't get upset. We'll be home in five minutes, stay cool, William."
Very impressed, the woman goes outside where the grandfather is loading his groceries and the boy into the car. She says to the elderly gentleman, "It's none of my business, but you were amazing in there. I don't know how you did it. That whole time, you kept your composure, and no matter how loud and disruptive he got, you just calmly kept saying things would be okay. William is very lucky to have you as his grandpa."
"Thanks," says the grandfather, "but I'm William... the little shit's name is Kevin."
That's what Lucianne said re Romney's fund-raiser talk.
Seems non-controversial to me. When he said "I'm not going to worry about those people" he was referring to getting their votes, with the implication that they are already bought. (I think he is wrong about that, BTW.)
Moral of the story? Never say anything that, when taken out of context, sounds bad. Of course, that is impossible to do. And for the MSM, everything Conservatives say is a gaffe.
At Drudge, as of now, 1 in 16 Americans are taking Disability. If 1/16th of America is really disabled to work, we're in big trouble. And what % use EBT cards now?
The Magnitude of the Mess We're In - The next Treasury secretary will confront problems so daunting that even Alexander Hamilton would have trouble preserving the full faith and credit of the United States
Does the State Department not know, for instance, that manufacturing pretexts for religious outrage is Lesson One in the Mideast lexicon of foreign-policy stratagems? The most obscene cartoons of Mohammed that provoked riots throughout the Middle East were actually added by the Muslim clerics who toured the region brandishing them; the Imam who accused a 14-year-old Christian girl of blasphemy has now himself been arrested for disfiguring the Koran and telling co-conspirators that this was the way to drive Christians from Pakistan. This kind of thing has been happening for centuries, but it happens more when both conspirators and rioters are unafraid of any consequences to themselves.
Took this lousy pic of a majestic White Oak on Saturday, growing on the edge of the marsh, on Constitution Island.
White Oaks are happy to grow near wetlands, and their acorns feed all sorts of wildlife. They are said to live 600 years. I have seen some huge ones surviving in woods where there had been pasture 100 years ago.
Quirky, quaint, and comfortably shabby and unpretentious, Cold Spring (pop. 1900) is a 75-minute commute to Grand Central Station on the Metro North Hudson line. A few commute daily, but a good number commute for weekends because if your legs are good, you can walk from the train station to everywhere in Cold Spring.
It's nice to see the downtown of a small town so busy with friendly people, walking people, busy cafes, etc. Seems to be the sort of town in which it is impossible to be anonymous.
The village is about 40 minutes north of White Plains, and a half hour south of Poughkeepsie, Hyde Park, and the great CIA - The Culinary Institute of America with its great restaurants. It's the Juillard of cooking. This view down the Hudson from the lawn of Boscobel, site of the famed Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival (their photo, not mine):
This is Lower Main St., with the little gazebo on the Hudson shore. I tried to avoid taking pics of people.
Orwell’s four motives for writing still seem to me the most honest account of why long-form non-fiction writers do what they do, with “sheer egoism” at the top; next, “aesthetic enthusiasm” – the pleasure principle or sheer relish of sonority (“pleasure in the impact of one sound on another”); third, the “historical impulse” (the “desire to see things as they are”), and, finally, “political purpose”: the urge to persuade, a communiqué from our convictions.
To that list I would add that writing has always seemed to me a fight against loss, an instinct for replay; a resistance to the attrition of memory. To translate lived experience into a pattern of words that preserves its vitality without fixing it in literary embalming fluid; that for me has been the main thing.
Iceland was a mess after the 2008 meltdown. By 2012, while GDP per capita is still at depressed levels, unemployment is also down dramatically and growth has returned, making Iceland a 'star' among the embattled European nations.
It helps, somewhat, to be a homogeneous and isolated isle. It also helps to let financial institutions fail so debt can be washed out properly.
I'm not a fan of rap music, but Russ Roberts and Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek have done a good job making economics entertaining for the younger crowd. I sent their Hayek vs. Keynes series of videos to my son at college. There is an appropriate correlation to the events in Iceland and Hayek's views. There is no Keynesian stimulus taking place there.
"[W]hen the boom has collapsed, there exist dislocations and disproportionalities in the world of industry, the wreckage of false expectations, which monetary manipulation is not likely to remove."~Lionel Robbins in 1934, writing on the Great Depression
I hope when little Bryan grows up he never Googles himself or his parents. I can’t imagine the horror when he reads that his parents wish they would have killed him. I wonder how quickly he will grasp that his parents think his life, since he has disabilities, isn’t worth living. I wonder if that jury considered how the disabled community would feel if they knew that a jury awarded these parents millions because they missed the opportunity to abort their disabled son.”
As Cabela's prepares the selection of guns it will sell for the holiday season and winter hunting, the outdoor-gear retailer has two plans: one if President Barack Obama is re-elected, and one if he isn't.
It also has been unclear how much of the violence was spontaneously triggered by the film and how much of it was spurred on by anti-American militants using it as a tool to grow and enrage the crowds.
This is my idea of a pizza. Thin crust so it's almost like a cracker, cooked in a wood-fired oven. Shape doesn't matter, and if it's not a little scorched it doesn't taste right. Toppings? Whatever you can find in the fridge or the pantry. No tomato sauce, please. Never! I think this one is Buffalo mozzarella, asparagus, sliced yellow tomato, and pancetta. Nice.
People with outdoor wood-fired pizza ovens have pizza parties where you assemble your own small ones from a vast assortment of ingredients, then throw it in the oven for 3-5 minutes. I have a pal who does this. That's how they made fast food in ancient Rome.
Someday, I will build an outdoor combination oven and grill out of fieldstone. Indoor cooking is for the birds, and ovens were never meant to be indoors. My Memphis cast iron grill/smoker is excellent - burns wood just as well as charcoal - but it would not work for pizza, bread or calzones where you need a deep oven with a banked wood fire in the back.
Here's how to use a wood-fired oven:
And here's Baking bread in the Wood Oven. Watch that, and you'll understand the luxury of electric or gas ovens - 3 to 6 hours to heat up a wood oven.
It is certainly true that we frequently deceive ourselves about the rationality and the intent of our choices. As easily as we may deceive ourselves, we are easily deceived too. The article explains some of the tricks magicians use to "force" our "free choices."
Professors are often put in an impossible position: Their students, regardless of IQ, typically have few actual academic skills when they arrive, and they know next to nothing substantive; yet they have an almost unassailable confidence in their belief that they are highly skilled and extensively knowledgeable. If a professor gives them honest feedback about the quality of what they produce, who would support him? The administration? The parents? The education school establishment? No, he would be on an island.
That is a lonely place, and it is expecting too much that more than a few outliers here and there would persevere. The students whom professors do care about are the small fraction who want to get Ph.D.s. Those students professors nurture. For all the other students, however, professors’ feelings tend to range from mild irritation to thinly veiled contempt.
But we cannot be too hard on the students, either. Ask even the serious ones what proportion of their classes they believe is actually worthwhile. Their answer: maybe 25 percent.
8:27 Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?"
8:28 And they answered him, "John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets."
8:29 He asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him, "You are the Messiah."
8:30 And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
8:31 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
8:32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
8:33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."
8:34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
8:35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.
8:36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?
Kayaked down the choppy and windy Hudson a piece from the charming, granola-feeling old river hamlet of Cold Spring, NY (which was packed with cheerful strolling, shopping, and eating people) then snuck under the Metro North Hudson Line bridge into Constitution Marsh just before the tide got too high to get under it.
They rent kayaks on the river. We rent kayaks. Kayaking on ordinary waters is easy for anybody. We did a good 4 hours. The rental guy said "Use your core, not your arms, and find your core rhythm." We are not proficient yet, but we sure enjoy it. The pros give the same advice for tennis, but I still use my arms. I have no core rhythm for anything.
Those hills are the Hudson Highlands, on the other (west) side of the river. Storm King. Dramatic. The Hudson there is still tidal, but low salinity. Can barely taste salt when you splash yourself.
Did not see a lot of migrants - no Teal yet. A migrant Harrier, Osprey, and some Spotted Sandpipers, a Sharpie, plus the resident Bald Eagles, Cormorants, Black Ducks, Mallards and herons (Great Blue and American).
A recurrent thought was that this must have been great for October and November duck hunting before the Audubon Society took it over. Good for Rail shooting too. The marsh is full of Wild Rice and Cattails. In the 1830s, some guy tried to make it a Wild Rice farm, hence the kayak routes and the abundance of Wild Rice.
No powerboats allowed. You could get lost in there if they did not have water-trail markers because it is a water maze. Good fun. We kayaked down to the southern lake, and visited the Audubon lodge there (and grabbed a coffee, chatted with the naturalist, and used their facilities).
If you kayak down the marsh around 40 minutes, you turn a corner and what do you see, across the marsh, across Constitution Island, and on the other side of the Hudson?
As I recall, George Washington picked that location. The big river is narrow and defensible there, due to Constitution Island poking into it.
Well they're not showing any lights tonight And there's no moon. There's just a hot blooded singer Singing 'Memphis in June' And they're beatin' the devil out of a guy Who's wearing a powder-blue wig. Later he'll be shot for Resisting arrest. I can still hear his voice crying In the wilderness. What looks large from a distance Close up ain't never that big.
From the new Bob interview in Rolling Stone, the interviewer had fits trying to get Bob to say he loved the O. Here's the best he could get out of him:
"He loves music. He's personable. He dresses good. What the fuck do you want me to say?"
...don’t worry, when your president’s so cool he’s doing gigs in Vegas, what happens in Tunis stays in Tunis.
As a Canadian, I’m interested to see that America has belatedly adopted the divided responsibilities of the Westminster system. Proceeding from the Pimp with the Limp show to Letterman to Beyoncé and back again, Barack Obama makes a perfectly adequate (if somewhat cheesy and downmarket) ceremonial queen.
Our experiment at civilizing the savage failed miserably in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will go on failing as often as we keep attempting it. And at the end of the experiment, there will be burning embassies and savages crying, "There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger", the same words that the bearded bandit who was one of the first Muslims and their many times great-grandfather was crying out as he was raping the shamelessly unveiled tribal woman who would become their many times great-grandmother.
"There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger" means that the Muslim need not waste time worrying about his conscience. His conscience is a Koran and that book says that he's entitled to kill any time that an infidel offends Islam by mocking his prophet, walking in front of him or building a skyscraper that is taller than a mosque. The Muslim need not waste time pondering the ethical implications of killing another human being to know that he is better than we are. His little black book assures him that he is better than us, that he has every right to kill us and that if he fails, he will be raping demon virgins who are so anorexic that their bones can be seen through their flesh.
But, we oh what good people we are, we will apologize for having an embassy and for having free speech and for getting our embassy in the way of their mob and our free speech in the way of our religious sensibilities.
...our media, terrified that their hero would be unmasked and themselves also then revealed as shallow and unworthy, focused their ire on Mitt Romney while the world burned, hoping that Romney had made a “gaffe” even when it was clear that his analysis, if not his timing, was correct.
Meanwhile, our government and its State Department have been revealed to be criminally negligent in the protection of their own people.
The roots of this negligence are a willed ignorance of the realities of the Middle East.
How all occasions do inform against me, And spur my dull revenge! What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple Of thinking too precisely on the event, A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom And ever three parts coward, I do not know Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do;’ Sith I have cause and will and strength and means To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me: Witness this army of such mass and charge Led by a delicate and tender prince, Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d Makes mouths at the invisible event, Exposing what is mortal and unsure To all that fortune, death and danger dare, Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw When honour’s at the stake. How stand I then, That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d, Excitements of my reason and my blood, And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men, That, for a fantasy and trick of fame, Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, Which is not tomb enough and continent To hide the slain? O, from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
Video: The Italian Carpool Lane
Are All Teachers 
I learned about 
Summer is slowly ending up here. Carpe diem. We're kayaking on the upper Hudson River this morning.