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. |
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Thursday, July 12. 2007Thursday Morning LinksRatatouille. Good clean simple fun for any age. Amazing computer graphics or whatever it is. Difficult to believe that no photography was used, but it wasn't. Cramer agrees. Basic Life Skills. Popular Mechanics. h/t, Insty Living from hand to mouth on a good income. Lots of folks in that category. Trying to buy stuff without a Made in China label. Difficult. But why would anyone bother? Just stay away from their food. Golf courses can double as wildlife sanctuaries. I think it's a great concept, and I have heard that it's beginning to catch on. Cattle produce more CO2 than all of the cars and trucks in the world. So why are they picking on cars and gasoline? Classical Values Africa needs trade not aid. Cafe Hayek Don Luskin blows his top about Krugman and socialized medicine. If people have to lie and distort to make their point, then they must have no point to make. Pope Benedict: More Latin, more pilgrims, more money - and no relativism or rock concerts. Times Online Where are all the single ladies? Map at Coyote. Lots of towns with lots of lonely ladies. Fed up with the Log Cabin Repubs. Gay Patriot Sex is private unless you are a Republican. Surber. Fair enough, but there is one difference: the Dems don't seem to care about sexual morality at all, and the Repubs say that they do. Thus the issue is hypocrisy, not morality. Bruce Bartlett retires his column, comments on the future of media. Town Hall The Netherlands re-thinking their liberal identity. Too bad they didn't think first. WaPo. h/t, Dr. Bob Bizarro world, bizarro eminent lawyers. Prof B In Poland, a Jewish Festival without Jews. NYT. Strange.
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I am writing to ask for your suggestions as to how we might build our arguments to stop the unrestricted development of the Blackfoot River Valley. Yesterday, the commissioners approved commercial zoning at the headwaters of the Blackfoot and the Clearwater Rivers. Big casino, or a big car dealership--we have limited restrictions and no zoning so it is anything goes. I think this is a time when the conservatives at Maggie's Farm need to come forward and help us craft a strategy for stopping this onslaught. Next up is an application for 60 single family houses on the Big Blackfoot River. Like I said:lazy, or cowardice in the name of an ideology that is allowing places this precious to be destroyed is no longer courageous, or smart. Your genuine suggestions as to legal strategies where there is no zoning would be much appreciated.
Huck, the other point of view probably includes the desirability of growth. How can anyone have an opinion who hasn't got the details--the presentation from both sides of the debate?
Please go to Google, click on Images, and then type in any of the following:
Blackfoot River Ovando You can also go to: www.Blackfoot Challenge. org We are asking and expecting that in the year 2007 the desired growth can be reached in town by going up and not out. Yesterday, the same commissioners also approved a 19 unit (19 STAND ALONE SINGLE FAMILY HOUSES) one small park, and a drive way with a 30' turn around: all of this on one 3.7 acre parcel. Given the 10 foot set backs and the promise of a house that is 1200 sq feet (two story), you can see there is no longer any reason to argue in defense of giving homeowners a little bit of land for a garden--they are not doing that here in MT. NOPE you can get the same piece of crap with only room enough to walk between two houses. This is what the next review will be about on the Blackfoot River: 60 free standing single family homes just like this. Now, why can't we just ask this developer to build a nice condo building in downtown Missoula and keep the Blackfoot River Valley accesible to all? Luskin is great. He's on the Kudlow show, which along with Jim Cramer gives CNBC a reason to exist. Luskin is a non-ideological economist, which makes him a deadly enemy of such Leninist apparatchiks as Paul Krugman, who has never been anything but party-line--and who lies as needed to advance same. No joke, he really does lie--deliberately--there's no doubt, he makes things up and the NYTimes prints it.
I should've said, he's 'often' on the Kudlow show--as a guest. Delicious to watch him dismantle the (occasional) agenda-pushers. Always a chuckle to watch their faces as it dawns on them that Luskin not only has their number, but knows how to express it--and plans to express it in the next sentence. The flop-sweat is palpable, LOL.
Huck, I have a 21 acre piece--left over from my sold dairy--with hiway frontage, just a few miles out of Blanco, which is fast growing, only a half hour north of San Antonio. I'm getting calls from some people who want to develop it for low-income housing (Blanco has almost none). I always beg off, not wanting to sell, nor blight a beautiful little area. Question--would it be more moral to step aside, and thus help offer younger, perhaps poorer folks an affordable decent place to live, or to preserve the aesthetics for us old-time got-it-mades? I wonder. I don't live on the place (the home place is seven miles away), and don't need the cash (holding an appreciating asset incurs no loss, anyway), so it's almost a laboratory moral question: To open a door, or not. The old gotta make way for the new. But, not today, maybe tomorrow. I guess that's a sufficiently weasely position.
One vote here to keep it intact, if you can afford it. The aesthetics and environmental goodness of pristine land will be important to succeeding generations. Sprawling’s better done on a comfortable chair or summer lawn, not over an entire beautiful countryside.
Smacks a little of NIMBY and Let Them eat Cake, so am probably wrong. Still--- Did I make the wrong choice and this tract wants to be sold? This is why I should never participate in straw polls, unless they're about hem length, or at least avoid offering opinions on Texas.
Golf courses as sanctuaries...interesting. I believe this may affect some of the research I am doing right now for the Land Trust. Thanks BD.
Any of those single and lonely ladies in Nashville happen to be conservative Dylan fans? Read somewhere (hope it wasn't here, blush) in the last day or two, that some newsperson--evidently a few months ago--had asked Dylan for a statement on GW. He answered something like "Global warming? Have you been outside? It's FREEZING!"
LOLOL--perfect. Golf courses provide a lot of habitat for animals, but labeling them dual use is a recipe for disaster. It's hard enough now to get an alligator removed from a water hazard without a 'dual use' label giving animal loonies a claim that it has a right to be there. If the wildlife can't be managed for the benefit of the golfing, there will soon be no golfing, then the golf course gets sold to a subdivider and the animals really suffer.
I don't think it's that black and white. Everybody in the South golfs around big gators, though. Once in a while, somebody can shoot a few and make a nice golf bag out of their hide.
I think I would much rather try to make ends meet on that $80,000 a year than on the $11 an hour I make. They can do things to get their expenses down to a reasonable rate. I've gotten rid of running water, electricity, phone and tv and still can't seem to get from paycheck to paycheck.
If it was just me, I could live just fine in a cabin on a mountain stream, without all those amenities & utilities. Unfortunately, I have to make a stab at normality, for the sake of family members. Dammit.
Amazing, darling, but maybe too solitary a mountain man (says who?):
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:_d0CWc9vsgcJ:myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/ccerino/archive/2007/06/02/naturalist-survivalist-adventurer-richard-proenneke.aspx+pbs,+alaska.+naturalist&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=10&gl=us Is there such a thing as “split the difference” between self-reliance and solitude and meeting social expectation and being dependent on the grid? That may be what retreats are all about. Teri. Sympathy and empathy. Are you in school? Three things, education, experience and skills. Order depends on the job. It is a hard and cruel world for some. Make yourself the unique other. Don't mean too make light.
Anon at 21:40. Here's my insanity, we were born too reach the stars. Off the grid is out of the march. Grasp for the past or be fuel for the future.
Re anon's link, what a story--that Proenneke was some kinda guy. Mercy.
Yeah Buddy, I agree, some kinda guy, but what did it amount too? Another historical site? And, no, I can't do seventy chin-ups anymore. Sorry for being a hard ass, but the opportunity for doing that kind of thing is approaching nil. I just happen to think that that sort of energy would do more good channeled to the future. Not in trying to live the remote past. Though it appeals too us all. Myself included.
We can still do 70 chinups--it just takes a month or so now--but what's a month? But those kind of folks DO help create the future. They are exemplars of individualism, and attract attention, which then changes the way others see things, even if only a little bit.
It's not what they do--it's what we do in reaction to them.
IOW, the act of interpreting what they do as good, or even heroic, reinforces our own beliefs. Or--importantly--vice-versa (enter cynicism, AKA 'death before life'). thanks, anonimo. may i ask, how did you make the little dipthongish doo-hicky over the first 'o' ?
Too much? I could say that little doo-hicky represents roof, domicile and structure, which is my trade, but it’s only a cut and paste from Portuguese for no particular reason at all.
Downside is that I have to keep it on hand to copy and that's a bit retentive for me. Will last 4 1/2 more days, best guess. I see, a trademark--makes sense. It had looked to me, before that info, sort of like a rickshaw guy with no facial features.
Great! Now I can add "alphabet parts nicknamer" to my long, addled, flibbertygidget resume.
Also, "alphabet parts inhibitor."
#19.1.2.1.1
anonimo
on
2007-07-13 16:10
(Reply)
LOL--well, we can't go all loosey-goosey on our heuristics, now, can we? That way lies the hurdy-gurdy world.
#19.1.2.1.1.1
buddy larsen
on
2007-07-13 16:23
(Reply)
Whatever you say.
#19.1.2.1.1.1.1
Ãnømínö
on
2007-07-13 16:32
(Reply)
LOL--ya scamp ya!
#19.1.2.1.1.1.1.1
buddy larsen
on
2007-07-13 17:10
(Reply)
Apropos of something, maybe the 70 chin-ups, read about the fifth and final Space Shuttle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Endeavour |