Maggie's Farm

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.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Much Sorry with Delays
Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
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NYC update
Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
Water Shoes
Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
Good news about The Great Courses
Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

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Friday, March 15. 2013

Friday morning links

Fatal Distraction: Teen Drivers And Passengers Are A Deadly Mix


Fun website: Forgotten New York


St. Patrick’s Day with Edmund Burke


The craft of writing english well - First rule: Avoid blurry words


Affordable Care Act Is Unaffordable And Onerous


It was designed to fail


5 Tips for Coming Out as a Black Conservative - It's like leaving a cult.



Jindal: No more income taxes for Louisiana


Coming soon: CIA to have access to your financial information


Climategate 3.0: Wigley accuses IPCC and lead
authors of ‘dishonest presentations of model results’; Accuses Mann of
deception; Mann admits


We'll be seeing a lot more of the climatology deception coming out in the next few weeks


Bloomberg’s Soda Folly - The mayor’s law has been struck down, but his reputation as a scold is safe.


Being a scold is just obnoxious. Being a scold via law is far worse.




Posted by Bird Dog in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 05:52 | Comments (9) | Trackback (1)

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The craft of writing english well - First rule: Avoid blurry words

I would also recommend Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose - this is kind of a guide to modern writing.

Just for fun though, The Disheveled Dictionary: A Curious Caper Through Our Sumptuous Lexicon and An Exaltation of Larks: The Ultimate Edition. The Disheveled Dictionary" is a riot just to read never mind use.

Accuses Mann of deception; Mann admits

It's all about the money and the money is starting to dry up so the perps of this fraud are going to start pointing fingers - at each other in cluster fark mode.

Jindal: No more income taxes for Louisiana

The more I see and hear him, the more I like him. He may be the real "savior" of the GOP - the NEW GOP that is - I'm not sure anything can save the old GOP.

I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop if you will. Like anything - if it seems to good to be true, it probably is.

The mayor’s law has been struck down, but his reputation as a scold is safe.

I'm going to brag again - I said this would happen and that Bloomberg had the potential to change the very nature of American society and culture. He is the classic scold, but what makes it worse is that he would deny his constituents the same things he allows himself. That is dangerous - it's not being a scold, not a nanny but a hypocrite.
#1 Tom Francis on 2013-03-15 08:06 (Reply)
I agreed w/ several of the commentors on the site, Mann Mann’s comment is not an indictment, it’s a concession that if this appears deceptive, then most everything else would as well. In short, Mann writes nothing here that is worthy of criticism.

Tom Wigley’s comments should be viewed w/ concern, just how much is he trying to force his viewpoint?

But it’s the first guy’s claim that is the biggest concern: “surely the data must be wrong”? Really? Models are to be driven by data, not data selected if they follow a model. If these data are wrong, then what does he base any of his hypotheses on? That’s the biggest indictment in this whole exchange.
#2 DrTorch on 2013-03-15 09:43 (Reply)
See, that's bad old-fashioned way of looking at data: "true" or "false." Nowadays we know that there are good and bad data, forward-looking and recalcitrant data, helpful and harmful data, data you can be trusted with and data you can't. Ignorance is strength.
#2.1 Texan99 (Link) on 2013-03-15 11:29 (Reply)
Re: The craft of writing english well - First rule: Avoid blurry words

you need three things. first, read and understand Strunk & White's Elements of style, if someone does this only, she is ahead of 90% of most writers. this is basic stuff, should be taught in high skools to the exclusion of anything else. Then, when you learn the rules, learn how and when to depart: Farnsworths' classical english rhetoric (a find from MF) and Stanley Fish's How to write a sentence. then pick a writer you admire (Ellroy, HS Thompson, myself) and take a good hard look at how he does it.

Second, find someone who will ruthlessly blue pencil your draft and hurl it back at you until you get it right.

Third, because you're always writing to an audience and for a purpose (even teenage girls scribbling unreadable love poetry know this), know your audience, the language and the structure of your genre. in my professional writing, I have to know formal argument and how to hang facts on the framework, and how to defeat or use errors of reasoning. on other forums, I have to creatively use obscenities and ridicule during political debate.
#3 wirraway on 2013-03-15 11:29 (Reply)
Another good NYC site is Jeremiah's Vanishing New York.
#4 LS (Link) on 2013-03-15 11:42 (Reply)
"The craft of writing english well - First rule: Avoid blurry words"

And include a picture of an especially fetching, half-naked young lady as a distraction.
#5 Agent Cooper on 2013-03-15 18:21 (Reply)
No more income taxes?

I like income taxes. Well, as much as one can like any tax. Unlike other taxes such as property taxes, they go down when your income goes down, and given the progressiveness common to our tax system, end up taking a smaller proportion of your income the lower the income you've got. For people considering retirement, or losing a job, or considering leaving the workforce as an alternative to purchasing childcare, that is a really good thing.
Property taxes, on the other hand, just keep remorselessly going up, even if you are living on savings and pension and see your income is inevitably dwindling as the value of your meager income is inflated away. One can't really say that we own real-estate if we keep having to pay rents on it, can we?
And sales taxes tend to hit two groups very hard -- those dependent upon luxury purchases for their income will find that the Yachtbuilding and jewelrymaking sales all seem to happen in low-sales-tax states, and those who spend the bulk of their income on necessities find the neccessities that much more expensive because of the tax. Just having income left over to invest or put in savings makes the sales tax on your income proportionally lower than that payed by the poor. I think there would be economic benefits for all by making our tax system flatter, but making it regressive is counterproductive in my view.
Also, income is "sticky" compared to sales and property values. Lots of states got themselves into pickles in the 2008 crash, because property values plummeted at the same time that sales of consumer goods plummeted. Employment went down too, but in the short term not nearly as much as the other sources of tax revenue.
#6 Douglas2 on 2013-03-15 22:46 (Reply)
If you prefer a progressive tax system, you should like property taxes. Rich people tend to own bigger, more expensive homes, and so they will pay higher property taxes even if the tax rate itself is not progressive. Property taxes are a tax on wealth. Unlike income taxes, they do not penalize poor people who are working to build their way out of poverty in order to acquire wealth. Taxes on income are disincentives for people to work hard and are thus counterproductive. By contrast, taxes on wealth and consumption are fair taxes because the people who can best afford to pay them are the ones who bear the biggest burden.
#6.1 Agent Cooper on 2013-03-16 00:48 (Reply)
Having been poor in a sales tax state I respectfully disagree. Food was not taxed and neither was rent. Clothes and most necessities were bought 2nd hand with no tax. The less income you have the less sales tax you pay because you cannot afford to buy those things which are taxed.
#7 GoneWithTheWind on 2013-03-16 00:33 (Reply)

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