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
Peach update, with pie
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

Categories


All categories

Quicksearch

Links

Blog Administration

Open login screen

RSS Readers

Add to Google

Subscribe with Bloglines

Tuesday, April 9. 2013

Tuesday morning links

The World-Changing Margaret Thatcher - Not since Catherine the Great has there been a woman of such consequence.


Annette Funicello, RIP


CURL: Obama’s 1 percent lifestyle hits a nerve


More like the .00001% - how many of the 1% have two custom Boeing 747s, plus the Marine 1 chopper, on 24-hour call for work or pleasure? Did you know this:



As a security measure, Marine One always flies in a group with identical helicopters, sometimes as many as five. One helicopter carries the President, while the others serve as decoys. Upon take-off these helicopters begin to shift in formation to obscure the location of the President.



NWS predicts active hurricane season


It's generator-buying time


Elites Close Ranks Around Ivy League Intermarriage


American Elites Fleeing Big Cities for the Heartland


Well, they still seem to go to New York first to try to earn their stripes


The twisted ‘logic’ of diversity


The NBA gets an A+ for diversity


Boston's taxicab mess – and the oligopoly behind it


‘Billions and Billions and Billions’: Biden Has No Comment on Fisker Failure


Amazon tax an Illinois disaster


Toxic Government by Democrats: Baltimore


Williams: Minority View: Why is Black Unemployment so High?


Thanks to technology, Americans spend dramatically less on food than they did 3 decades ago


More Than 101 Million Working Age Americans Do Not Have A Job


Wasted, unproductive lives, with a burden of shame especially for men. It's heartbreaking. I blame Bush.


Public Sector Unions Reeling In Wisconsin


Free choice is good.


US Passes Saudi Arabia In Oil Production


What will happen to Europe?  It seems almost certain that it will gradually descend into a sort of third-world debacle -- or, rather, much of California or most of Detroit today. 




 

Posted by Bird Dog in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 05:23 | Comments (17) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments
Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

RE - Baltimore - I can attest to that. I refuse to work in the city any longer, since its pretty much a free-for-all zone.

Its lovely in the sunlight, but make sure your insurance is up to date if you venture there after the sun goes down.

Living outside the beltway, between both large metro areas (Philly is up 95 from me), its truly amazing how much lack of protection there is in Charm City
#1 fred zeppelin on 2013-04-09 08:15 (Reply)
We must have been neighbors. I lived in Harford Cty, very close to I-95.

Maryland taxes are high, and what you get are: poor roads, bad schools (although we home school) and a big pit to throw your money down, named Baltimore.

Too bad, b/c it's a beautiful state.


Oh, and since when hasn't the NWS predicted lots of hurricanes? This has been an annual routine with them.
#1.1 DrTorch on 2013-04-09 09:30 (Reply)
Hi Neighbor - I live in that French town, at the top of the bay...
#1.1.1 fred zeppelin on 2013-04-09 10:55 (Reply)
Aha. You probably know where they keep the real duck museum then.

We were in Belcamp, but moved last Jan.
#1.1.1.1 DrTorch on 2013-04-09 12:03 (Reply)
Re - ducks - sadly, yeah....

Hope you moved to better climes.
#1.1.1.1.1 fred zeppelin on 2013-04-09 12:12 (Reply)
Among Americans, I'll bet Thatcher proves just as enduringly popular as Churchill. The newspapers here dislike her but her long tenure as PM is testament to what British voters thought of her, and I don't doubt she would have been as successful here with our voters too, had we been fortunate enough to have her as an American.
#2 MTF on 2013-04-09 08:27 (Reply)
"101 Million Working Age Americans Do Not Have A Job", and it has ever been thus:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EMRATIO/

We're just replacing which 35% don't have a job.
#3 Douglas2 on 2013-04-09 09:12 (Reply)
American Elites Fleeing Big Cities for the Heartland

That is just telling use the cancer is metastasizing. The cities aren't the problem, it's the people and their politics.
#4 JKB on 2013-04-09 09:42 (Reply)
I drove a cab in Boston for 4 months in 1975. At that time you didn't lease a cab/medallion. The cab companies owned the medallion and the cab. You got a hackney license from the Boston Police (do you speak English? Do you have a felony record? Give us your fingerprints ...) and applied to be a driver for one of the companies. If they accepted you showed up when you felt like driving. If they had a cab you would get in and start driving fares. As you drove you wrote down the pick-up and destination of each fare and how much the fare was. This was your "waybill". When you felt like ending you would drive back to the garage, drop off your waybill, and hand over the money. They'd give you have the fares you collected - the tips were yours.

They maintained and fueled the cabs - which did NOT have dividers, BTW, someone could have held me up with a knife or a sharp pencil held to my neck.

The management would track the number of miles you drove. If you did not generate enough money/mile (I think it was $0.50/mile) consistently they would stop having a cab for you when you came in. A new driver would get cut some slack on that for a couple of weeks until you learned how things worked.

It was after I stopped driving that the leasing system came in. That handed pretty much all the risk over to the driver. That's lousy for them.
#5 RonF on 2013-04-09 10:26 (Reply)
--re 'twisted logic', welcome to bizarro land, where "PC" and "Diverse" are not only not mutually-exclusive (as they are, per the meaning of reality, in English), but are, within the dialectic, synonymous!
#6 buddy larsen on 2013-04-09 11:08 (Reply)
Wow - I must be old - I understood the whole line of reason... =)

But, I attest the Bizarro meme - living here in Absurdistan, these days, even thinking in the opposite of what you see is even more 'strange'. Muddling thru people's thoughts from their spoken word is akin to psychosis...

Is there a Thorazine dispenser nearby???
#6.1 fred zeppelin on 2013-04-09 11:22 (Reply)
Well, i went back in time and wrote the below 'before' i read the psychosis appraisal. Now you got me wondering, hmmm
#6.1.1 buddy larsen on 2013-04-09 11:33 (Reply)
PS,

Public Sector Unions Reeling In Wisconsin

...as in, the state has bit on a baited hook, and the unions are reeling it in?

See, this is why that little dot with a tail is named after a comet --because, in the main or in the breach, it can Tungusta Forest (wiki: "The mysterious 1908 Tunguska explosion that leveled 830 square miles of Siberian forest was almost certainly caused by a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere") a sentence.
#6.2 buddy larsen on 2013-04-09 11:25 (Reply)
The World-Changing Margaret Thatcher - Not since Catherine the Great has there been a woman of such consequence.

Wasn't that a mistake? Didn't you mean Annette Funicello?
#7 Gringo on 2013-04-09 17:09 (Reply)
Re: Twisted logic of diversity..."Apparently, the only minority group that matters are blacks, since the NBA gets an A+ even with the significant under-representation of Latinos and Asians."

We all know what the 'N' in NBA and NFL stands for. It doesn't bother me that one racial group is over-represented in both sports because my eyes tell me that on the court and on the field it's talent that determines who plays. On the other hand, the grading is clearly hypocritical, and that's troubling to a lot of us Americans who think it's high time to stop counting by skin color.

As I've written before, the effects of the same kind of twisted thinking can be seen in advertisements that appear in the print media and on TV: white males have disappeared from a lot of advertising; if there is a white male, you can be sure there will also be a black male for "balance", as if 50/50 is equity; there are quite a number of ads with no whites and only blacks, but the reverse is extremely rare; Asians in national ads are scarcer than hen's teeth; and if anyone in an ad is cast to fill the role of the "bad guy" or the "dumb guy" or the "crazy guy", invariably he's white, not a minority. The same "twisted logic" applies to broadcasters on sports shows on TV, at least it's fairly common on the ESPN network, which I watch quite regularly, just as it was true of the panelists for the half-time show on the CBS network throughout the men's NCAA basketball tournament, several of whom were obviously not chosen for their talent or skill, since IMO none was in evidence.
#8 Agent Cooper on 2013-04-10 02:09 (Reply)
Two changes in Basketball will dramatically reduce the lopsided benefit that an unusual birth defect gives to the player (the defect is being over 6'7"). 1. Raise the basket two feet. 2. Make the court half again as wide and about twice as long. This will bring skill back into the game replacing the birth defect of unusual hieght common to people from Africa.

Football: Make the field half again wider and reduce the number of players to 7 and play the game in shorts and tees with no helmet and throw players out of the game for unnecessary roughness. This will eliminate the advantage to 300 lb weight lifters and bring skill into the game
#8.1 GoneWithTheWind on 2013-04-10 10:21 (Reply)
LOL. I think there are actually simpler ways to "fix" both sports. First, the BB referees should go back to the rulebooks and start calling traveling and palming the ball. That will take us back to a "purer" form of the sport before Michael Jordan ruined BB forever with his now very popular style of play. A lot of the dunks and aggressive play under the basket by the giants of the sport would be nullified if they were called for walking and charging. Second, the NFL should stop giving its girly-man QBs like Tom Brady and Peyton Manning the special status and protection that's become the hallmark of today's effete sport of professional football. I think that might help to moderate the role of the speedy WRs and slot backs, and also help to return the game to the glory days of very special players like Johnny Unitas.
#8.1.1 Agent Cooper on 2013-04-10 18:35 (Reply)

Add Comment
(Your e-mail will not show in your comment)

By commenting on this site you agree to the site rules listed here. Email
addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for email notifications.

Quick reference guide: [i] italics [/i], [b] bold [/b], [u] underline [/u],
[url] (web address) [/url]. More tips here.

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

BBCode format allowed
 
 
A Chris Southern Consulting website.