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.
A wonderful story. The Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, owned and run by the Dutch West India Company, was a quickly growing and boisterous commercial settlement of over 200 when the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts. When the Dutch sent a friendly delegation up to Plymouth in 1624 or so with goodies and gifts of sugar, William Bradford sent a letter back with the delegation saying that he was sorry that he had nothing desirable to offer to return the favor.
On quote from the book re the Wickquasgeck Trail:
Broadway does not follow the precise course of the Indian trail, as some histories would have it. To follow the Wickquasgeck Trail today, one would take Broadway north from the Customs House, jog eastward along Park Row, then following the Bowery to 23rd St. From there, the trail snaked up the east side of the island. It crossed westward through the top of Central Park; the paths of Broadway and the Wickquasgeck Trail converge again at the top of the island. The trail continued into the Bronx: Route 9 follows it northward.
The Customs House was the site of the original Dutch fort to protect them from the Indians. The Lenape Indians turned out to be friendly to the Dutch (believing them to be potential allies against other tribes), so the fort was never well-maintained. Hence the Brits had no problem taking the town in 1664.
Today the Customs House is the home of the Museum of the American Indian. Worth a visit.
Related, years ago I read Beverly Swerling's City of Dreams: A Novel of Nieuw Amsterdam and Early Manhattan, which does a great job evoking the times - and the medical care of the times. Many would argue, I think, that NYC remains more of a Dutch heritage city than an English one.
"Shopping in the sense of the ceaseless search for the next object that will thrill for a moment and satisfy for a minute is the main interest of people without a purpose."
...according to a number of recently released scientific studies, dogs are not merely emotional con artists: they are also intellectual con artists. They've learned not only to fake love; they've managed to convince us that they are a lot smarter than they really are. In both cases they play us for the saps we are.
The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.
I recently posted on the subject of Death, taxes, and death taxes in view of upcoming legislative considerations of current death taxes, and I see a post by Patten at NRO which echoes my views. He explains:
Often referred to as the death tax, the estate tax was established under the guise of ensuring “fairness.” Progressive reformers of the early 20th century thought a tax on lifetime earnings and savings would prevent “gross inequalities of wealth.” Instead, the estate tax destroys capital, the fuel that keeps the economy growing. When capital is difficult to acquire, some people are unable to start businesses, and some of those who already have businesses can’t expand them — resulting in fewer jobs for others.
Read his whole brief and to-the-point post. Estate taxes are wealth and asset destroyers. I want more wealthy people and wealthy families, not fewer.
How about Florist's Transworld Delivery - FTD? Isn't that a sort of business that was waiting a long time for the internet to appear?
(Wiki says: FTD was founded as Florists' Telegraph Delivery in 1910, to help customers send flowers remotely on the same day by using florists in the FTD network who are near the intended recipient. It originated as a retailers' cooperative and began a process of demutualization in 1994.)
FTD was recently bought by an internet company, United Online.
While many if not most businesses have benefited in one way or another by the internet, some businesses like FTD seem to have been made for it - just born too early.
Post your examples/ideas about pre-internet businesses, which in retrospect seem to have been designed for the internet, in our comments.
...from a letter Jefferson wrote in 1762: “The old-fellows say we must read to gain knowledge and gain knowledge to make us happy and admired. . . . Mere jargon! Is there any such thing as happiness in this world? No: And as for admiration I am sure the man who powders most, perfumes most, embroiders most, and talks most nonsense, is most admired.”
The Massachusetts model, yet again - Boston Globe "Six hospitals to sue state over payment shortfalls": "The suit charges that Massachusetts violated a law requiring adequate reimbursement to hospitals for patients insured by the government. The hospitals contend the state set repayment rates so low they do not cover the cost of such medical care." Fear not, all these issues will be ironed out in the federal plan. Paul Krugman told me so.
You may suppose that those with a resilient faith in end-of-days global warming would be more distraught than anyone over these actions. You'd be wrong. In the wake of the scandal, we are told there is nothing to see. The administration, the United Nations, most of the left-wing punditry and political establishment have shrugged it off. What else can they do?
To many of these folks, the science of global warming is only a tool of ideology. To step back and re-examine their thinking would also mean — at least temporarily — ceding a foothold on policy that allows government to control behavior. It would mean putting the brakes on the billions of dollars allocated to force fundamental economic and societal manipulations through cap-and-trade schemes and fabricated "new energy economies," among many other intrusive policies.
Krauthammer spoiled his excellent piece on medical insurance by claiming a moral imperative for medical insurance.Not for medical care - for medical insurance. I agree with the Powerline guys that this part of Krauthammer's piece makes no sense.
It is a moral imperative for parents to take care of their kids as best they can. And, in a nation founded on equality in the face of the law, you could make a case for universal free national legal care.
Socialized medicine is no more insurance than Social Security is. What it is is having the government - ie your neighbors - pay your bills. That's not insurance.
Right Wing Prof is in a nursing home now, more or less, I think, and dealing with his apparently terminal cancer, pain, and frustrating dependency on others - yet posting as he is able at his Central Pennsylvania Orthodox site.
God bless this sweet, devout, tough, shy fellow who has been a blog pal for several years. From his posts at his other site, Right Wing nation, he has been one heck of a devoted, creative, and demanding prof of mathematics, statistics, and business-and accounting-related numbers.
I recently accused him of morphine-blogging. That was my attempt at levity. One of his recent posts:
One of my brothers and his family came the night before last, and are still here, but they’re leaving tomorrow morning (they went to eat; they’ll be back later this evening). My other brother and his wife got here a couple of hours ago, and will leave Monday. And April, who has been here for a couple of days, will leave the day after tomorrow, then, it will be back to Christopher and the folks from Holy Trinity, until next weekend, when yet more family comes from Indiana.
Dark place or not, I have people who love me, and I’m not sure that’s the case for everybody here.
Authors can be judged in many ways. The timelessness of one's book. Its readability. The deep, underlying truths contained therein.
But those aren't the only ways to judge an author.
What about ingenuity? Originality? The brilliance of an idea never thought of before? A correlation; a conjunction of ideas that few others, if any, have made?
Some guy chases a big whale all over the place. Moby-Dick. A lawyer defends an innocent black man. To Kill A Mockingbird. A bunch of Okies migrate to California. The Grapes of Wrath. Architect makes it big. The Fountainhead.
These are original ideas? They might read well, and there are certainly some deep, underlying truths running around the place, but, by my definition?
Pretty boring, really.
Below the fold I present the case that the late Michael Crichton was perhaps the greatest original author of all time.
I'll present the argument. You answer the challenge.
OK, now Obama’s presidency is becoming super embarrassing. I honestly feel like someone is going to come out and pat him on the head all patronizingly. His latest Jobs Forum, (kind of like a Summit, I think, only not as fancy pants) to be hosted on Thursday, is yet another example of how woefully unprepared and hopelessly in over his head he is.
...even if you accept the IPCC predictions, look what happens. The IPCC says that world temperature will increase by 2100 by somewhere between 3.2F and 7.2F. A warming of half way between these two points works out at an average temperature increase of 0.05 degrees F per year. In the last 25 years of the past century, temperature increased at the rate of 0.04 degrees per year. (In this century, it has not increased at all!) Has this proved so appalling to manage?
Lord Lawson then notes that the IPCC predicts that, at this level of temperature rise, global food production will actually increase. He takes the IPCC's gloomiest prediction of the economic effects of global warming over the same period. By its own figures, the difference between what would happen with global warming and without it amounts to this: in a hundred years' time, people in the developed world would be "only 2.6 times better off than they are today, instead of 2.7 times, and their contemporaries in the developing world would be "only" 8.5 times as well off as people in the developing world are today, instead of 9.5 times better off". So this is the projected catastrophe, to avoid which the people of the present generation are being asked to curtail their carbon emissions by 70 per cent.
Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown — in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand — that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.
...the Climategate e-mails reveal an unprecedented, systematic conspiracy to stifle discussion and debate, conceal and manipulate data, revise temperature trends that contradict predictions of dangerous warming, avoid compliance with Freedom of Information requests, and pressure scientific journals and the IPCC to publish alarmist studies and exclude dissenting analyses so as to manufacture "consensus."
I am not a professional climatologist but a common-sense fellow. Therefore I think I have more credibility than the average person who makes a living from "climate change." I enjoyed Coyote's Catastrophe Denied, but I think even he gave too much credence to existing data.
It seems to me that there is no accurate way to measure "global temperatures" or "global climate" other than via the troposphere. Tree rings and sediments and weather stations are ridiculous "proxies" for "global climate." Furthermore, there is no such thing as a "global climate" anyway.
The reason is that, at sea level, the earth consists of thousands of climates and millions of micro-climates - all on land undergoing constant fluctuation and all impacted by natural ebbs and flows and much of it impacted in some way by man and his land use, urbanization, etc (The earth's population was 1.2 billion in 1850, now it is 6.8 billion.) - and the ocean remains incomprehensibly complex with all of its oscillations and strange fluctuating vertical and horizontal currents.
I am not a climatologist, but I am always a skeptic about whatever experts tell me. I am a skeptic even about the 0.6 degree F change in the past 150 years. I think all of our temperature data is meaningless beyond its immediate locale - except for the troposphere data which we have only for recent years.
Science is never about truth. It's just about the theory and hypothesis du jour. That's what it's supposed to be.
The Sam Adams Winter Classic selection is interesting and very tasty this year. The Cranberry Lambic is unique, but whether it is a true Lambic or not I cannot say.
(Disclosure: The Boston Beer Co. was kind enough to ship 1000 cartons of Winter Classics to Maggie's Farm as a neighborly thank you. That should get us through December, anyway.)
I was being facetious yesterday about Climategate and Palin, but not today: is the Afghanistan "plan" timed to provide cover for health care? Sort of a wag the dog thing?
Am I getting smarter about how pols manipulate us, or am I getting paranoid? Or both?
Tiger Woods drives 
The Glorious History of Handel's Messiah
How about Florist's Transworld Delivery - FTD? Isn't that a sort of business that was waiting a long time for the internet to appear?
A friend and beer afficionado responded to our post about Sam Adams' Winter Classics with this email:
Via 
Right Wing Prof is in a nursing home now, more or less, I think, and dealing with his apparently terminal cancer, pain, and frustrating dependency on others - yet posting as he is able at his 
Authors can be judged in many ways. The timelessness of one's book. Its readability. The deep, underlying truths contained therein.
The Sam Adams Winter Classic selection is interesting and very tasty this year. The Cranberry Lambic is unique, but whether it is a true Lambic or not I cannot say.