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.

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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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Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
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Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
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Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
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Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

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Tuesday, December 14. 2021

Tuesday morning links

Atlantic: Is Dentistry a Science?


Read the article. The new dental technology is a blessing in my view. Expensive, though. 


 Confused About COVID? Who Isn’t?


 Rules are rules! Police enforce 1.5-metre social distancing with giant rulers during Covid protest in Frankfurt


 What a Progressive Utopia Does to Outdoor Dining. In San Francisco and elsewhere in California, the red tape that prevented dining alfresco before the pandemic is starting to grow back.


 People are upset with JK Rowling again


 ‘The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is A Woman’: J.K. Rowling Slams Scotland Police For Move To Record Male Rapists As Women Based On Self-Identity


 The Second Great Age of Political Correctness. The P.C. culture of the '80s and '90s didn't decline and fall. It just went underground. Now it's back.


 Ghislaine Maxwell, Elizabeth Holmes and Me - Amanda Knox on why we can't look away from female villains.


Abigail Shrier:  What I told the students of Princeton - Show some self-respect and reclaim your freedom


 Call 'Latinx' What It Is: Lexical Imperialism 


 The media will never apologize for going all in on Jussie Smollett. The people who were skeptical all along of the actor’s lies are not at fault


 "We Can Never Believe Police": Cal State Prof Denounces Smollett Verdict As A "White Supremacist Charade"


 Kamala Harris tries to fake it just as Peggy Noonan told her to


 Biden's spending bill could double child care costs for middle-class Americans. Families could pay up to $27,000 more for child care each year under Biden's spending bill


 'Conflicted Congress': Key findings from Insider's five-month investigation into federal lawmakers' personal finances


 Abraham Accords herald a new normal for Israel, Arab allies - opinion. Sometimes things that suddenly seem normal tell you how the world has changed.


 “APARTHEID” AND THE MEDIA’S COMPLICITY IN A MODERN-DAY LIBEL

Posted by Bird Dog in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 07:55 | Comments (8) | Trackbacks (0)

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1.5 meter social distancing? But Science™ has declared 6 feet to be the exact proper amount! Are the Germans some sort of heretics or Science™ deniers? This is madness!
#1 Jerryskids on 2021-12-14 09:00 (Reply)
Virtual signaling knows no bounds.
#1.1 OneGuy on 2021-12-14 09:45 (Reply)
What does the science say? Clearly distance works but I would guess 6 feet or 1.5 meters wouldn't be enough. 100 yards and up wind might assure no transmission of a disease. But it seems obvious that this isn't about preventing transmission of the disease but really about looking like you are doing something. If that is all it is I would rather they go back to offering "thoughts and prayers" instead of destroying businesses with these useless mandates.
#1.2 Anon on 2021-12-14 10:58 (Reply)
I could be wrong, but I think the Abraham Accords could go down as the signature foreign policy achievement of Trump's term. There had to have been some modicum of willingness, maybe even eagerness, to begin with from the parties concerned; what was needed was getting them aligned and over the line.

The net effect has been to render the Palestinian conflict into a new, more accurate perspective: A small, nasty local squabble that seems to want to perpetuate itself, unnecessarily. A lot of the problem has been the refusal to report on it accurately, with the various 'Pallywood' productions of staged 'atrocities' and so on, but also the malcoverage of the Palestinian problem by the Corporate Media. And to be honest, the malcoverage of the Abraham Accords, too.

Jared Kushner's work reminded me a little of Jimmy Baker's deftness, getting nuclear arms out of the picture in the post-Soviet world. A huge problem just kind of got taken care of. The modern Arab Nations are sidestepping all of the grievance history and moving ahead, and this aligned leadership is fast making the foreign policy positions of a lot of countries irrelevant, US included. They own it now, and that's progress.
#2 Aggie on 2021-12-14 10:14 (Reply)
My thoughts exactly. While everyone else was shouting, Kushner got some actual work done. Good for him.
#2.1 Assistant Village Idiot on 2021-12-14 10:22 (Reply)
I've had only one dentist proposed what seemed like an iffy cap, and I quit going to him. My current dentist never presses me to have any procedure done unless I'm experiencing pain. If a tooth begins to be sensitive to cold or pain, we monitor it, and we waits for me to tell him when it's bothering me enough. His root canals take only 45 minutes. In the 15 years I've been seeing him, I've asked him to perform maybe 4 root canals. They're a little pricey, but they stop a toothache dead in its tracks. There have never been any complications. He has very up-to-date equipment that makes the drilling fast and extremely accurate.

Though I haven't had to try any dental implants yet, I have a friend who had an excellent experience with them that returned his ability to eat anything he liked.

Dental practice has been big strides since I was young.
#3 Texan99 on 2021-12-14 16:26 (Reply)
Re: Al fresco dining/parklets in San Francisco: I would like to take issue with just one item in this article: San Francisco's weather is not necessarily conducive to eating outdoors. Outside of maybe the three hot spells you can count on per year, the rest of the time it's breezy bordering on windy, with a chill coming right off the Pacific. Many of these outside structures have to have propane heaters just to make it hospitable.

However the author is correct in terms of the red tape nightmare this whole thing has caused. At the height of the lockdown, restaurant owners took on extra debt to build these structures and the city then charged rent on the poached parking spaces, adding insult to injury. I know one place that would dearly like to get rid of it, as it's a logistical nightmare for the serving staff but the city says no. As long as there are some sort of pandemic related measures in place (and SF just ramped them up again over the Omicron "spike") they are here to stay. Some even outlive defunct eateries, becoming makeshift shelters for the homeless. With no business to claim ownership for keeping them clean, the filth builds up.
#4 KellyM on 2021-12-14 16:58 (Reply)
Call 'Latinx' What It Is: Lexical Imperialism

Lefties have been imposing their ideologies [plural, because their ideologies and narratives change day-to-day] on Latin America for decades. Two examples follow.

Recall the phonics versus 'whole language' brouhaha for teaching reading? Lefties tend to go for 'whole language.' I ran across someone pushing 'whole language' in Guatemala. Given the phonetic nature of Spanish spelling, phonics makes even more sense than in English because it is much easier to connect letter to sound in Spanish compared to English. But gringo lefty imperialists go pushing 'whole language' in Guatemala.

For another case of lefty imperialism, consider Lori Berenson. She was a lefty 'progressive' who decided to assist MRTA, a Peruvian lefty terrorist group. She did so without realizing that by 1995, the year she was arrested, most Peruvians were fed up with lefty terrorist groups- Sendero Luminoso [Shining Path] and MRTA being the main ones. But don't listen to ordinary Peruvians. Progressive lefties from the US who have been in Peru for 2 weeks know much more about Peru than ordinary Peruvians who have lived in Peru all their lives. Moreover, Lori Berenson made the assumption that her US passport would protect her from Peruvian law.

She found out differently, and deservedly served a 20 year sentence.
#5 Gringo on 2021-12-14 17:50 (Reply)

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