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 fair while back I did a post on starting a private 'family blog', where only family members (and maybe close friends) can make posts and comment. It can really bind a family together, especially when they're strung out across the continent. And WordPress makes it so easy that anyone can make a post with pics and vids of the grandkids playing in the back yard — those little dickens.
Pic: Exhibit A
I've received a handful of complimentary comments and emails since then, but this one kind of stood out. It's cutely done in something of an over-the-top manner, which I like. It also reminds me of a friend of mine who claims to have the most dysfunctional family in the country. Or did until this arrived.
Dude! You done saved my family's ass. There are four clans, located in Washington, Colorado, Kansas and Maine. Involved are seven uncles, eight aunts and seventeen cousins.
In short, cousins Gary and Susan dislike each other, Aunt Meredith dislikes Aunt Jinny, Aunt Jinny dislikes Uncle Bob, Uncle Bob dislikes his brother Charles, Uncle Charles can't stand any of the Kansas gang, and the Kansas gang doesn't particularly like the Washington clan. I should also mention that Aunt Sue and Aunt Margaret are always snipping at each other, Uncle Bob and Aunt Hilda are talking about a divorce, and Uncle Bob and Cousin Dave almost got into a fistfight at the last family reunion over who was in charge of the BBQ.
I would also be remiss if I didn't mention that Cousin Nancy will never, ever, forgive Cousin Jason for accidentally killing her pet bunny rabbit 20 years ago, Cousin Dave will never, ever, forgive Cousin Gary for wrecking his prize motorcycle 11 years ago, and Cousin Ron (me) had decided that I would never, ever, forgive Cousin Becky for voting for Obama -- twice, no less.
That's how things stood eight months ago.
My, how times do change. About 2,000 family blog posts later, with a few exceptions I'm not sure if any of the above is still true. Uncle Bob and Aunt Hilda went ahead with the divorce, which was probably best for everybody, and no clear resolution of the murdered bunny rabbit has been reached, but for the most part the remainder of the grudges and pet peeves have been resolved and we had a family reunion two weeks ago in Steamboat Springs, CO, that was the best one anybody can remember.
In most cases it was just a matter of talking things out, like the piled-up motorcycle. In the blog, Cousin Gary pointed out that he was only 17 when he wrecked it and it was because it had rained earlier and the roads were slippery and he just wasn't used to such conditions. Amazingly, Cousin Dave admitted that as a wise old 19-year-old at the time, he had to shoulder some of the blame for letting a beginner take it out in dangerous conditions, and that basically settled the whole score. The next thing ya know, they're pairing up as a doubles tennis team at the reunion and cleaning everybody's clock with superb game play and excellent teamwork.
Aunt Sue and Aunt Margaret, the two "snippers," formed the social committee for the week-long event and it was when they gave each other a great big warm hug when saying goodbye that I realized I owed you an email saying thanks. I had forwarded the original link to Cousin Becky who set up the site, and according to her everything went "smooth as silk," so thanks also for the great set-up guide. I even partially forgave her for voting for Obama -- twice, no less.
Best regards, Cousin Ron
And you're mighty welcome, big guy.
And he's right about the value of communication amongst family members. My middle brother and I went through about a decade of estrangement ages ago, but then we took a canoe out at a family reunion about ten years ago, spent the whole day talking and got it all hashed out. I thought of that a few weeks ago when we had a great chat on the phone. There's just something about getting family problems out in the open that's wonderfully cathartic.
My how-to site is here. If you're going to give it a spin, it's important to do the five steps in order. The link to the web hosting service I use pops up when you get to that part of the setup routine. There's a specific page on setting up a family blog and a Quick Reference Guide for the newbies.
When it comes to getting a blog or web site going, nothing beats WordPress, although how much you get out of it depends on how involved with the settings, plugins and widgets you get, hence the value of an in-depth how-to site. At 50,000 words spread over 81 pages, this monster is probably the biggest how-to WordPress site on the 'Net. It takes twice as long to get through the setup routine as the next site, but you'll learn four times as much.
The Hidden Jobless Disaster - At the present slow pace of job growth, it will
require more than a decade to get back to full employment defined by
prerecession standards.
What level of domestic data collection is currently engaged in by what government agencies? And what degree of privacy do Americans want and expect in their digital and electronic communications?
President Obama is now caught in a trap of his own making. By downplaying the threat and trying to create an atmosphere of peace and normality in the country, he has delegitimated the measures he believes that our safety requires. Having tried and failed to keep these secrets dark and hidden, he must now try to explain what many Americans will find inexplicable. If the terrorists are really on the run, and we can finally go back to a 9/10 state of mind, why are you assembling and wielding the most powerful and intrusive systems of surveillance ever conceived?
Government loans are not a favor for students and their families. They are a subsidy to an unaffordable education industry. Just as with government bailouts, subsidies, and tax breaks, government policies tend to freeze the inefficient status quo in place, and to inhibit reform, new ideas, new more efficient solutions. Obamacare attempts the same.
Yes, I happen to oppose the mortgage interest tax deduction too. (I am also opposed to the income tax in general, the death tax which is a game for lawyers and accountants and prevents families from building businesses and independence, and the corporate tax which also amounts to creating an industry for lawyers and accountants.)
Public schools want to teach sexual matters from Kindergarten, and to make sure the kiddies know all about sex, safe sex, anal sex, oral sex, masturbation, mutual masturbation, gay sex, etc. The schools thus stimulate, or overstimulate our innocent youth. Heck, coeducation is overstimulating in itself.
At the same time, Twerking is sexual harassment of some sort. How a Twerk dance harasses anybody is beyond me. It's meant to be silly fun. As Instapundit says cleverly "Welcome to the neo-Victorian era — bringing back the censoriousness, but not the virtues..."
Not only did we never fight for this sort of stuff, our country has consistently fought against it from the very beginning. America has an illness, and the illness is amoral central power. It is nauseating to think that the NSA and the IRS are using our tax dollars to scrutinize us. It's sick, and inspires rebellious emotions. Safety is no excuse.
On a related topic, in the planning for D Day the weather, sea conditions, moonlight, and tides were crucial to Eisenhower's planning staff. What was the weather like during D-Day?
I am reading a wonderful historical fiction book by the brilliant Giles Foden about the meteorologists, physicists, and math geniuses involved in the weather predictions for D Day: Turbulence: A novel.
As it turned out, the weather was lousy and the sea state unwelcoming, and thus the German defenders of France were not expecting a visit.
In the mid-1970s, Congress, for the first time, investigated the surveillance activities of the US government. Back then, the mandate of the NSA was that it would never direct its surveillance apparatus domestically.
At the conclusion of that investigation, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho who chaired the investigative committee, warned: "The NSA's capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter."
With up to 40% of American kids being born today to single mothers, often with neither alimony nor meaningful child support, alimony, like marriage, is irrelevant to the lives of many Americans today.
Some states are ending lifetime alimony. One must wonder to what extent the risk of alimony is a deterrent to marriage. (It certainly can be a deterrent to divorce, at least for a while).
Nevertheless, there surely seem to be a lot more two-income households today than there were in the 50s (even though many women did work outside the home then). However, in the 50s there were almost no single moms other than widows. It was considered shameful.
Women married to functional men take jobs not as a matter of economic necessity usually, or as a matter of personal fulfillment. It's usually a matter of people wanting an economically-higher standard of living, better financial security, or the ability to pay escalating tuitions and housing costs.
The most puzzling airline disaster in history has the most befuddling answer in the history of airline disaster solutions.
In brief: In 2009, in one of the most modern airliners ever built, Air France 447 took off from Rio in Brazil and was safely on its way to Paris, last contacting land while partway over the Atlantic.
And then it disappeared.
A few months later, the PBS show 'Nova' put together a team of experts to figure out what most likely happened. They had some serious heavyweights on board, like a guy who took part in the investigation of the tragic, final flight of the SST, and a guy who worked on what was considered the 'most puzzling crash in history' of its day, Flight 800 out of New York, which inexplicably blew up just off the coast, later traced to faulty wiring in a fuel tank.
But at least the Flight 800 team had little clues to work, like "where it went down".
As referred to, say, if it went down.
Because of the curvature of the earth, cross-Atlantic flights always go off radar at some point, and it was only hours later when it didn't show up on African radar that the alarm was even sounded. If a small electronic monitor box hadn't automatically sent a quick 'update' to headquarters via satellite link somewhere between 1 and 15 minutes before the crash, they would have been totally clueless where it ended up, and even then they just had its last known location and were forced to consider where the wreckage could be spread over hundreds of square miles of open ocean. And in 15,000 feet of water.
Random terrorism seems to work. But why would Muslims be offended by their great historic invasions of Europe? They conquered Spain, they reached the outskirts of Paris and the gates of Vienna, but their current invasion is far more successful and likely permanent.
I am not sure whether 501 (c) 4 exemptions should exist, but as long as they do, they should be available to all who qualify. I'm not sure the IRS should exist either. Too much power. I'm open to other ideas about federal tax collection.
From Kling's Tribal Politics - Progressives, conservatives, and libertarians each have a mythology in which they are the heroes and the
other tribes are villains. Partisans of these three ideologies even
speak different languages.
America’s slow-to-nonexistent economic growth, of which today’s manufacturing data are one of many symptoms, is the result of bad government policies: out-of-control regulations, excessive and inefficient government spending, rising tax rates and the impending disaster of Obamacare, to name the most obvious ones. Until observers are willing to acknowledge the extent to which poor government drags down the economy, they will continue to be surprised by unexpected bad news.
The greens have deluded themselves into thinking that somehow market forces didn’t apply to manufacturing “clean” tech. It just illustrates the lack of policy competence in the green community, and the cleverness of crony capitalists, who know the silly greens will lobby for your sweetheart deal if you sprinkle some of their favorite phrases into the promotional literature.
Writers, like talkers, like to tell stories, and most people enjoy well-told stories. A well-told story is a wonderful thing in life, especially because most of our lives are made of humdrum stories - at least on the surface. The most revelatory stories can be touchstones for a life, eg the Bible stories.
Gerard posted a snippet of the best-told story in American history. It won't make you "good", but it's at least as rich as sausage gravy. I should say, as rich as spermaceti.
A fair while back I did a post on starting a private 'family blog', where only family members (and maybe close friends) can make posts and comment. It can really bind a family together, especially when they're strung out across the continent. And WordPress makes it so easy that anyone can make a post with pics and vids of the grandkids playing in the back yard — those little dickens.
FYI: Drowning people 
NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Americans Daily
I suppose there's an irony here somewhere:
Photo: 
Pic: The stove in a friend's cabin in Vermont