Maggie's FarmWe 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
Categories
QuicksearchLinks
Blog Administration |
Friday, September 26. 2014Friday morning linksHow to best survive a black bear attack Here's a Griz, but it makes the point Vanderleun: The Web Above Us Derek Jeter hero in Bronx finale Nice Sol Stern on The Free Speech Movement at 50 - The movement won; free speech lost.
The real story: he was there. So Long, Shaker Pint: The Rise and Fall of America's Awful Beer Glass - How the entire U.S. came to drink out of a vessel never meant for human lips. 7 Reasons Why Dating Multiple Men At Once Made Me Crazy Just not up to the job. Bright women date a lot, and handle it. Do Statistical Disparities Mean Injustice? Where Have the Young Farmers Gone? Ever hear of estate taxes? An ebola doc reports A Voice Can Be Heard, From Painful Necessity, Commanding, ‘To The Compost Heap—Go!’ Labor Giant Puts Politics, Pay Over Serving Teachers - NEA spends more on lobbying than representing members Via SDA:
Peace Protests, R.I.P. WHITE LIBERALS Say Obama Gets Away With War-Mongering Because He’s Black Privatize air traffic control I like and respect Mitt, but please no What Karl Rove Won’t Tell You - Wave goodbye to the Republican wave? Jamie Gorelick? please, no Stuff Bush Didn't Do, Illustrated
U.S. Immigrant Population Hits All-Time High: 41.3 Million People Too many to assimilate Iraq War critic says Iraq withdrawal may have been the worst strategic mistake of all Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
>How to best survive a black bear attack
#1. Should be, carry a firearm. Let's not kid ourselves why that black bear killed that hiker. Bears are amping up for hibernation right now, and need a huge daily caloric input. Easy pickings. I live near where that young man was killed and I walk regularly in wooded areas. If I lived in a free state, a loaded sidearm would be my defense.
Where Have the Young Farmers Gone?
The cost of regulation isn't mentioned. Being harrassed and fined (without ability to fight ) EPA, DEP, County Extension Agents as well as the massive amount of paperwork -yes- paperwork in getting permits and permission to spread manure, cut and store hay, regulators for the dairy, walk throughs by enviro-weenies who dictate animal husbandry practices (with no basis on cost, or practicality). It's a bit of a deterrent to someone who actually wants to work, something that's also becoming rare today. Whatever happened to;"Never piss off anyone who owns forty acres and a backhoe...".
Never heard that! I don't know why anybody should step lightly around a farmer - especially now that they've been portrayed as hicks, beat up by EPA, and the IRS.
If I had to choose the stronger of the family farmer and the heavy hand of giverment, I'd have to choose the giverment every time. Also, around the town where I grew up, farmers have become much more efficient with new technology and equipment. They are able, and it is necessary because of increased costs, to farm larger and larger acreages. The smaller farms are absorbed into larger farms through purchase and just renting other farms, so the owner of the rented farm leaves farming and becomes a landlord. Sadly, I can watch the little town slowly dying.
"Examples of sexual violence include . . .withholding sex and affection..."
I would guess whoever wrote this has never been married . . . If this is the criterion - I would assume that about 100% of adults in a relationship have been sexually abused at one time or another. Seriously - who comes up with this stuff? JG Dating: I'm sure I'm bright enough to handle dating a lot of guys at once, but it sounds dreary. It's like this: if there's one I like, I lose interest in others. If I didn't feel like that about him, I'd lose interest in dating him. It comes out looking like deliberate loyalty, but it's more of an instinct. I'm just not likely to attach to more than one person at a time, or to enjoy hanging around with someone to whom I'm not becoming attached.
I agree. When I was young and single, I always had loads of suitors, and many male friends, but I was too busy with school, work, and whomever I liked best to waste my own or the guys' time with games or using anyone as "filler" (what a horrible thought). The men I was interested in were equally unwilling to waste time on someone who wasn't serious future mate material. People with stupid jobs and few outside interests may enjoy being sluts or the male equivalent and having multiple relationships at once. But my peers and the men I liked didn't want to waste time. Flirting is fine, going out a few times with a congenial person to see how you like each other is fun, but more than a few dates with someone you wouldn't consider for a future husband? Dumb. Even when one had no intentions of settling down right away, a boyfriend is one's best friend, so why have meaningless relationships with others? Of course, I'm a boring one man woman, married over a quarter century, so I know nothing....But my daughters likewise don't hook up, and don't date multiple people at once. Like me, they are loyal and tend to fall in love with someone who is their best friend. Better practice for marriage IMHO...
"U.S. Immigrant population hits all-time high 41.3 million people. Too many to assimilate."
I doubt this even includes accurate counts of illegals. This is intentional. It is being done primarily by NGO's but with government acquiescence. The motives are not pure, the intent is to fundamentally change the face of America and destroy our middle class. What they did tell us is that all or most all of the immigrants are given enormous amounts of money averaging $5000 a month. Illegal immigrants don't get quite as much but most do get various forms of welfare. Almost every illegalimmigrant qualifies for housing which you and I pay for. Why? Simple question; why? was it pure stupidity/ignorance in that the government never understood that spending 100's of billions of tax payer dollars on these immigrants would be too great a burden for the middle class to sustain? Or was it intentional? I mean, seriousl, could they really have been so stupid that they didn't understand that paying immigrant families $5000 a month for life might harm tax paying American citizens? Of course they knew that. So why? The reason varies slightly but under the covers is the same. Many in the NGO's resent our "wealth" and feel we need to be taken down a notch or two. After all you hear the complaints about the McMansions we live in and how it isn't fair that we have such a high standard of living while poor people around the world live on $2 a day. Many in NGO's and government are pure socialists/communists and would like to destroy the capitalist system and doing that while giving the middle class their comeuppance is just frosting on the cake. And many in the NGO's, in government and behind the scenes are straight out racist and they hate white people and see this as a perfect chance to make them pay for real or imagined slights of the past. This will be the downfall of this once great country. We have borrowed $18 trillion or so to pay multiple generations welfare and this is not a sustainable plan. Following Saul Alinsky's rules for radicals to overwhelm and crash the system will result in 50, 60, 70 million people who suddenly won't be getting welfare and they won't be ableto selfmedicate and feed their habits and they will be pissed. It will make the L.A. riots look like a Sunday picnic, literally! But even this is not an unintended consequence of some well meaning attempt at equality or something like that. Seriously, you would have to be basic math challenged to not uderstand that our present system of welfare cannot be sustained and it will crash. Then you would have to be totally naive of human nature to think that all those people we made dependent won't be angry when it crashes and fill the streets killing people robbing stores carrying off 60" TVs chanting "no peace, no justice" or something. Our leaders know what is going to happen. They know it even while they bring in more illegals and immigrants from countries who hate us. We are in the late stages of a giant political ponzi scheme and this is the critical part of any Ponzi scheme, the quickening, the period where the gains look the highest but the risk looks the worst. All the politicians, bureaucrats, pundits, NGO's and hangers on who are playing the game have one foot in DC and one foot in a safe haven for when it all goes upside down. The trick is to not miss the last helicopter out of Washington DC. And will the useful idiots be surprised when human rights in the rest of the world devolves and all start following us right on down the drain?
A good article about conservatism from David Brooks--I know, I know that most at MF hate DB, but I don't. So here is the article, please do go down and read the comments. They must have a filter on that site because the comments are very thoughtful and make a valued contribution to the conversation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/opinion/brooks-the-conservative-mind.html?_r=0 P.S. Dear GWTW--I agree You are right, I don't like Brooks.
"It’s not so much that today’s Republican politicians reject traditional, one-nation conservatism. They don’t even know it exists. " Bull. I know it existed, I watched it fail. Brooks can claim Reagan was one of those guys all he wants, he wasn't. HW Bush was, and he failed spectacularly. "Do Statistical Disparities Mean Injustice?"
The issue deserves a more insightful analysis than this BS article, which uses shark attacks in Australia to make some kind of a pointless point. The blog concludes with one of the idiotic statements I've seen in weeks: QUOTE: Courts, bureaucrats and the intellectual elite have consistently concluded that "gross" disparities are probative of a pattern and practice of discrimination. Given all of the differences among people, such a position is pure nonsense. Apart from being a strawman argument, because any statistical claim has to be evaluated on is merits, racial disparities in certain circumstances are examples of injustice if both discriminatory effect and discriminatory intent are shown. Furman v. George invalidated the death penalty partly based on abuse of prosecutorial discretion, and see studies like Baldus, David C.; Pulaski, Charles; Woodworth, George (1983). "Comparative Review of Death Sentences: An Empirical Study of the Georgia Experience". Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 74 (3): 661–753. doi:10.2307/1143133. JSTOR 1143133 and the outrage over McCleskey v. Kemp. Easy to evade hard questions by yammering on about the "the disgraceful lack of diversity in professional basketball and ice hockey". The author rails against "intellectual elites", I get his point, my beagle is one of them by comparison. This author is an asshat. I remember all those peace protests in the 1960s. The protestors claimed the war was immoral and they were protesting on moral principles. I also noticed that after the draft ended the protests ended. One protestor gave the game away when he stated in an article that he was "terrified of the draft" and afraid he would be sent to Vietnam. That was really what the protests were about. They were anti draft protests.
They never protested at NVN embassies, or about NVN's attack on the south.
I don't have a link I can point you to. It was something I read. That is that the federal government pays refuge families that are settled in this country about $5000 per family in cash and benefits until they can fully assimilate. Most refuge families are settled in communites with others from the same country and choose to act and live like they are still in their home country and the family doesn't assimilate with one exception. That is they learn quite well what they can demand of the government so it is likely that the $5000 amount is just the tip of the iceberg.
|
Tracked: Sep 28, 10:10