Maggie's Farm

It's a bitterly cold and blizzardy morning here - lovely,

From Bookworm, Movie Review: Disney’s “Frozen”

My own review: Picturesque as heck, but tedious

It’s Not a Church, It’s Just an Apple Store

Men are not women.

Bob Grant, Father of Conservative Talk Radio, Dead at 84

Ten Forms of 2013 Media Malpractice

New York Gets The Communist Leader It Deserves

2013: The Year The Progressive Narrative Collided With Reality

Obama To Americans: You Don't Deserve To Be Free

WHAT RECOVERY? George Will Exposes Obama’s Failed Economic Record

Professor: Obamacare Failed Only Because of Racist "Southern White Radicals"

Republicans should not underestimate the appeal of inequality rhetoric.

IMO, talking about inequality is a diversion from talking about how lousy the economy is for almost everybody except for the very rich - and for government employees

The light bulb ban
provides a useful window into the mindset of liberals: the debate has
nothing to do with which bulb is better, but rather who gets to decide

2013 Ratings: CNN Hits 20-Year Low, Fox News Dominates

Ship of Climate Fools: The rescue

Via Insty, The Complete List of Everything Banned by Bloomberg

Poll: Americans Have Little Faith in Government

Does climate change mean more snow or less snow? (It means both)

A Multicultural Lull: Only 1,067 Vehicles Torched in France on New Year’s Eve

Bad luck: Same family killed by Assad in Syria and by IDF bombing in Gaza

New Lawsuit over San Diego Sea Lion Poop

Government injunction against The Little Sisters of the Poor

Justice Sotomayor Blocks Contraception Mandate for Catholic Order of Nuns

Four things you might not know about dark matter

How Gun Accidents Happen

People who pursue unhappiness

Some people are only happy when they are unhappy, angry, or in a mess

Families: The two-parent factor

E.R. Costs for Mentally Ill Soar, and Hospitals Seek Better Way

Via Vanderleun:

“The Great Virtue Shift.”

Almost every act regarded in the mid-20th century as a vice was, by the opening of the 21st century, considered a virtue. As gambling, obscenity, pornography, drugs, divorce, homosexuality, abortion and sneering disaffection became The New Virtue, government at all levels began to move in on the action, starting with casinos and currently involving, in several states and the District of Columbia, an officially approved and bureaucratically managed narcotics trade...

2013: The Year of Shamelessness - America reached new depths of depravity this year — but just wait for 2014 to outdo it.

De Blasio Draws All Liberal Eyes to New York City

Obama’s pollster suggests reporters avoid citing polling data in 2014

Obama’s 2014 War on the Poor - More unemployment benefits and a higher minimum wage? Couldn’t be worse for struggling Americans.

The Economic Hokum of 'Secular Stagnation' (WSJ paywall)- Blaming the market for the failure of bad government policies is no more persuasive now than it was in the 1930s.

Hospice firms draining billions from Medicare (h/t Dr. X)

Democrats Gear Up to Portray Chris Christie as Sexist Ahead of 2016

10,988,269: 2013 Closes With Record Number on Disability Getting Highest-Ever Monthly Benefits

...the next time you see/read/hear about "dark money" and ALEC or the Kochs
in your media outlet of choice, and you don't see anything about Tides,
it's time to fire your media outlet.

McArdle:  Change Is Obamacare's Only Certainty

Taking Office, de Blasio Vows to Fix Inequity

Easily done. Tax the businesses, the prosperous, and the middle class until they move out. Camden, NJ, has excellent economic equality, while NYC is the place half the planet would like to move to for risk and opportunity. And for the generous Welfare, too.

From an important essay by George Friedman:  The Crisis of the Middle Class.

 In the 1950s and 1960s, the median income allowed you to live with a single earner -- normally the husband, with the wife typically working as homemaker -- and roughly three children. It permitted the purchase of modest tract housing, one late model car and an older one. It allowed a driving vacation somewhere and, with care, some savings as well. I know this because my family was lower-middle class, and this is how we lived, and I know many others in my generation who had the same background. It was not an easy life and many luxuries were denied us, but it wasn't a bad life at all.

Someone earning the median income today might just pull this off, but it wouldn't be easy. Assuming that he did not have college loans to pay off but did have two car loans to pay totaling $700 a month, and that he could buy food, clothing and cover his utilities for $1,200 a month, he would have $1,400 a month for mortgage, real estate taxes and insurance, plus some funds for fixing the air conditioner and dishwasher. At a 5 percent mortgage rate, that would allow him to buy a house in the $200,000 range. He would get a refund back on his taxes from deductions but that would go to pay credit card bills he had from Christmas presents and emergencies. It could be done, but not easily and with great difficulty in major metropolitan areas. And if his employer didn't cover health insurance, that $4,000-5,000 for three or four people would severely limit his expenses. And of course, he would have to have $20,000-40,000 for a down payment and closing costs on his home. There would be little else left over for a week at the seashore with the kids.

And this is for the median. Those below him -- half of all households -- would be shut out of what is considered middle-class lifE...

As the Christmas trees come down and the holiday cheer is stored away, this from Mead: Born of a WHAT???

 The specifically Christian idea of the Virgin Birth is one of the most controversial and confusing theological concepts around, and a Yuletide blog which didn’t take on the topic wouldn’t be doing its job.

Sued for a medical study? Unhelpful science?

Those ambulance-chasers never quit

Ski Helmet Use Is Up, but Brain Injuries Aren’t Down

Better idea to ski for style and control. I've tried the other way...in youth. Got banged up a bit.

Genetic testing - not useful

Japanese Snaggletooth Craze Spawns Dental Procedures, Girl Group

Not from The Onion:  "Towards a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies"

A commenter says "Translation: No one asked me to the prom."

Also Kimball:  Inadvertent Comedy from the ASA, or, an Ecofeminist Does Milk:

 Every now and then... something truly egregious bubbles up from the dismal pit of pseudo-intellectual academic lucubration, some special gem of fatuous, wood-pulp darkening nonsense that even now, at the fag-end of Anno Domini  2013, has the capacity to spark a little frisson of nauseated wonderment in this jaded breast. As it happens, the latest such production comes to us courtesy of our friends at the American Studies Association, that’s to say it comes from its official literary organ, the American Quarterly. Perhaps your subscription to this pointless agglomeration of polysyllabic, reader-proof grievance-mongering has lapsed.  Mine has, too. But my fellow connoisseurs of repellent academic nonentity will not want to miss “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies,” by one Greta Gaard, “an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker.” (According to an opus called Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches, she is “one of the most influential ecofeminist scholars.” Ponder that.)

Obama’s federal government funded hardcore porn project

40,000 new laws take effect in 2014

Got 'em memorized yet? You could get in big trouble for each one of them.

Christmas shopping 1958 vs. 2012 illustrates the ‘miracle of the marketplace’ which delivers better and cheaper goods

A circus producer said Friday that an animal rights group has paid it
$9.3 million to settle two federal court cases claiming elephant abuse.

1950 : Melting Of Polar Ice Indicates Radical Change In Climatic Conditions

That was before the global cooling scare, now replaced with the HotColdWetDry Scare

Inequality -- Crisis or Scam

MSNBC Panel Mocks Photo of Romney Holding Adopted Black Grandson

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Why Obama frets about income inequality, not family breakdown.

Not PC to discuss family breakdown

President Hollande Gets His 75% Tax on the Rich

Genius!

Detroit Abandoned, and Then Tore Down, a Major Library, Complete With Books

Liberals Really Psyched For An Executive Order On Minimum Wage

At Am. Spectator:

 ...the Robertson-A&E dust-up was merely the latest in a long — very long — line of leftist attempts to impose supposedly sophisticated moral pretensions on the rest of the country.

This laughable air of moral superiority has been at the root of everything from the violence of the anti-Vietnam War rioters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and Obama pal Bill Ayers’ Weathermen to today’s Occupy Wall Street crowd. And all manner of things in between.

In 1969 alone this seemingly bottomless well of sniffy moral arrogance and condescension propelled student strikes or shutdowns at some 400-plus universities...

The NYT tries to pull Hillary’s Benghazi acorns out of the fire, they get burned

$6 Billion Wind Power Subsidy Expires; Battle Looms to Extend It

End it!

George Will: 2013’s lesson for conservatives

Bret Stephens via Betsy:

 Class-consciousness has always been a fact of American life, but rarely is it about how the poor, or even the middle class, feel toward the very rich. It has been about how the professional class—lawyers, journalists, administrators, academics—feel toward the financial class. It's what Volvo America thinks about S-class America.

That idiot you knew freshman year, always fondling a lacrosse stick, before he became the head of his fraternity—his bonus last year was how much?

Best of 2013: Charles Krauthammer diagnoses Obama's policies, psyche

NYT: Oh, by the way, we had a reporter on the scene during the Benghazi attack

NYC: The Old Regime and the New - Will Bill de Blasio tackle New Yorkers’ real problems or undo the achievements of his predecessors?

Mead:  Chicago’s Blue Crack-Up

Guardian: It won't be long before the victims of climate change make the west pay - The
scientific case is strengthening: developed countries are to blame for
global warming – and there will soon be a legal reckoning

Good grief

Holiday in Austerity Land: 1.3 Million Americans Lose Jobless Benefits

At some point, your long Sabbatical on the taxpayers' nickel has to end, even if it means a crummy job

Extending Unemployment Benefits: Obama's Urgent Political Priority:

"...how is it that paying 1.3 million Americans not to work creates jobs?  That one has never been explained.  Every respectable economist I've consulted states that when unemployment benefits run out, a greater number of workers return to the labor force."