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

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Tuesday, June 10. 2014

Tuesday morning links

NYC's food trucks in the 1800s


The Affordable Housing Racket


School for butlers


Now this is interesting - the Turing Test


What If What You ’Survived’ Wasn’t Cancer?


The Labor Force Participation Rate Has Been Steadily Declining Since Obama Took Power


First World Problems: "Faculty Gender Climate Task Force"


Good grief


The New York Times’ Great Doobie Freakout - Don’t hate Maureen Dowd; the whole paper’s gone reefer-mad.


8th Grade Lesson Plan Asks Girls to Declare How Far They Will Go Sexually


The boys will be interested...


FDA to Save Us From Scourge of Wood-Aged Artisanal Cheese


Finally. Those expensive imported French cheeses are so dangerous that I eat them at every opportunity.


Thanks, Taxpayers, for My Subsidized Ticket on an Airplane Gutted to Meet Stupid Regulations


Man Deploys 18 Goats to Clean Up Detroit, But Bankrupt City Rejects Their Help


Sheriff of Sleepy Indiana County Say He Needs Military-Style Armored Vehicles Because “America Is A War Zone”…


America: Beware of Single-Payer Health Care


VA mess giving big government a bad name


Steyn:  The ‘Vigilance’ Vigilantes - The tolerance enforcers will not tolerate dissent.

Posted by Bird Dog in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 05:21 | Comments (16) | Trackbacks (0)

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Re: 8th grade lesson plan

I guess it all depends on what's more important at school. Apparently, it ain't "the three 'R's"!
#1 mudbug on 2014-06-10 08:48 (Reply)
the teachur who planned the lessen is a pedophile. he wasn't having those 13 year old girls stand in front of "all the way" signs for their health.
#1.1 Frigate on 2014-06-10 09:08 (Reply)
Hopefully (though I'm not holding my breath), the teacher and the principal (at least) will be prosecuted. Education, like so many other things done by our government seem to be just another criminal enterprise.
#1.1.1 mudbug on 2014-06-10 09:24 (Reply)
NYC Food Trucks of the 1800s - Where the sanitation meets the streets. Tune in this fall.
#2 JKB on 2014-06-10 09:52 (Reply)
I love the article about subsidized airlines. It is the perfect example of intrusive government at work. I would laugh, if it weren't my money being wasted.
#3 mary on 2014-06-10 10:01 (Reply)
Re: Turing test

Recently, academics haven't exactly shown themselves to be dispassionate and objective about just about any subject. However, I think they are right to worry about the gains in artificial intelligence. I do think they're late to the party. Their intelligence seems to have been artificial for some time.

Seriously, some advances in artificial intelligence and biology are very worrying. I think we're heading into a "brave new world". I don't think there is any way to stop it (you can't uninvent something) so we're stuck with it. Hopefully, we will be able to minimize the dangers.
#4 mudbug on 2014-06-10 10:26 (Reply)
If (big IF these days) the setup of the test was as I heard it, not so big.

It was a program pretending to a 13yr boy "from Russia" speaking English to Englishmen.

Or Microsoft support in other words.
#4.1 John the River (Link) on 2014-06-10 16:52 (Reply)
Steyn: The ‘Vigilance’ Vigilantes - The tolerance enforcers will not tolerate dissent.

Bad link. The ‘Vigilance’ Vigilantes. Link corrected.
#5 Gringo on 2014-06-10 10:45 (Reply)
The affordable housing racket is just another left wing scam. While the "tax" may be well hidden it is there never the less. the buildrer developer has to "eat" the cost of the affordable units. But of course you don't really think that they "eat" the costs do you? They pass it on to the buyers/renters of the remaining units. The continung costs are often partially or fully paid by direct taxes on the productive citizens. What makes this all worse is for the person who actually gets the affordable unit it is like winning the lottery. They can stay there forever at a greatly reduced cost and of course for this reason there is no incentive for them to ever work or get out of the dependency class. These are tenured apartments generally for life. Real affordable housing abounds in most of America. Perhaps not in NY City but throughout America trailer parks allow a poor person a affordable housing solution. Both my father in law and mother in law lived in nice two bedroom mobile homes for under $400 a month which covered everything but electric. Carports and small yards just big enough for a pet and a garden. THAT is affordable housing. Forcing a builder/developer to subsidize housing for the indigent is not "affordable housing" it is socialism.
#6 GoneWithTheWind on 2014-06-10 10:51 (Reply)
The Steyn link is fake: it only LOOKS like a link, but is not clickable.

Detroit: Another Not Invented Here idea shot down...well, after all, where's the graft opportunity?

VA: Just ONE example of Big Government giving itself a bad name.
#7 Sam L. on 2014-06-10 11:00 (Reply)
VA, single-payer -
Most, if not all, has been gone through by the UK's NHS. When government noted patients were waiting for long times in the ERs, measures were taken and penalties imposed on the hospitals/Trusts. Which responded by not allowing ambulances to offload patients until ER doctors were available so they would not show up as waiting in the hospital. longer term waits, even over a year, also a problem.

Many of the problems are bypassed, or at least alleviated, in the German and French systems. The government acts like a "single payer" provider, BUT private [supplementary] insurance - and treatment - is available (largely banned in the UK system as are private hospitals and such. and fairly cheap to boot) and widely used. The discrepancy with the UK system is so wide that the NHS has resorted to sending patients out of country, mostly to France, when beds are (too often) in short supply.

Yet it is the UK system mostly looked at and copied by US (and Canadian) legislative proposals.
#8 John A on 2014-06-10 11:31 (Reply)
Does that sheriff seem a little paranoid?
#9 Ray on 2014-06-10 13:48 (Reply)
If American is a war zone, fight it with troops, not police. Don't give police SWAT hardware and vehicles. Have the State's Governor call out the National Guard. If Chicago took 300 Guardsmen, put 2 each on 100 street corners and scattered the other 100 in a few small groups to be called upon to mobilize to any spot where anything serious breaks out, you'd see murders, rapes, muggings, etc. drop to rock bottom. And you've have people trained to handle the weaponry and vehicles actually handling them. Don't tell me they don't know how to deal with civilians, not after so many have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
#10 RonF on 2014-06-10 13:50 (Reply)
"What If What You ’Survived’ Wasn’t Cancer?"

yes, let's all stop treating early diagnosed cancer and wait until it's spread enough that we know it's going to kill the patient.
That way there's more glory for the oncologists, more money for the hospitals, and a far higher chance of the patient actually getting killed, or if they don't ending up needing lifelong remedial medication to replace their destroyed immune system (and thus even more money for the doctors, hospitals, and pharma companies).
#11 J.T. Wenting on 2014-06-10 14:00 (Reply)
Saving us from Woodboard Cheese ~

Life in First world Murica is so cushy that regulatory agencies have nothing better to do but ban things - just because they can, with extra bonus points if it squashes the entrepreneurial spirit.



What the general population doesn't seem to understand yet, that these "IT'S FOR YOUR HEALTH, IT"S FOR YOUR OWN GOOD" premises are so OPPOSITE.. due to control hungry jack booted hammers who see nails everywhere are actually weakening human beings to a squishy mass of neuroses who can't handle stress of any kind.

Removing 99.9% of germs doesn't strengthen your immune system, it weakens it.
The strongest bone in the body is the bone that has been broken and healed - because it responded to stress by packing more calcium deposits at the point of breakage.

Muscles don't get stronger by resting them, they get stronger by stressing, rest, then re-stressing them to the point where they become resilient, and have more mass.

The progressives are De-evolving us to all become pajama-boys.

RESIST!
#12 figment on 2014-06-10 15:58 (Reply)
Airline:
I'm not sure what to think. I get the gist of the gripe. But what is the alternatives:
To meet rules, the airline removes the seats, but still sells 19 tickets?
Are they mad, because the airline didn't cancel the flight because it wasn't "full" of 9 people?
What's the point?
Do you want to get on a bus, subway, plane with standing room only so you can bitch about not adding enough capacity?
#13 Jerry on 2014-06-11 02:27 (Reply)

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