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.
"The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself."
...if an employer has 40 full-time workers and 20 part-time workers, that employer would be considered by the government to have 50 full-time workers and would be subject to the mandate because the 20 part-time workers average to 10 full-time workers – meeting the 50 full-time-worker threshold.
House Passes $50 Billion In Sandy Relief (Mostly Unrelated Pork) With Democrats Providing Majority Of The Yes Votes - UPDATE: Less Than Half The Money Is Sandy Related
The Whiz Kids - They didn’t come here to cut spending:
This is the overcaffeinated game of leapfrog that’s characterized Washington for years. Policy wonks and whiz kid pundits fly to a problem, waving calculators and smacking each other with rolled-up charts in attempts to get there first. Legislation is passed that supposedly ameliorates the problem. Everyone trips over each other and gets a convenient case of amnesia. Then it’s on to the next problem. And for God’s sake, don’t look back at the previous one…or at least not for another few years when everyone can return and try to solve it all over again.
Americans are suckers for a sob story. But a lot of them are also suckers for personal freedom. Whenever a bullseye is put on freedom for the greater good, two narratives battle it out for the soul of the country. "We have to fix this" and "Leave me alone."
Think of We have to fix this" and "Leave me alone" as the devil and angel on the shoulders of every cartoon character for the last hundred years. "We have to fix this," wears an earnest expression and her appearance is calculated to suggest nurse, teacher or PTA member, when in reality she's usually an Ivy League grad with a lot of time spent in government and political advocacy and whose kids are raised by Elena from Guatemala, whose immigration status is that of Undocumented Democrat.
It's the best use of an inexpensive chuck roast or round. Pot Roast can be terrible dry mystery meat, or it can be OK. Pot Roast never looks very appealing, and should taste better than the pile of grey, well-overcooked meat looks.
Either way, it gets the family well-fed and meated-up. Kids need meat to grow their brains. I like this recipe because it has lots of my favorite root vegetables in it, parsnips, turnips.
Pot Roast is not a roast, it's braised. I call it Braised Beef and it has to be cooked until fork-tender.
You know you are reaching true adulthood when you read articles about The Kids These Days and end up grimacing. We have posted about the hooking-up culture in the past, about "friends with benefits," and about how the youth are mating randomly and promiscuously like rabbits in the woods and yet are spared the reputational problem which would have occurred when I was 20.
Voyeurism is fun, but tacky. From what I see in life, which is quite a lot, it seems to me that these stories are the exception rather than the rule. From what I see, the average middle-class American girl avoids casual sexual encounters and wants to be treated respectfully if not lovingly. There is a bell curve, and the left tail of the curve is sociopathic.
So much for the girls. For the 20's guys, there is no doubt that it has gotten very easy to get lucky in the bars these days, if that is how one chooses to live. The modern trends of feminism are great for the guys: they get much more sex and sexual variety without committment, and the women make their own money. Unless you feel that relationships are a serious matter and that using others is a form of low life, that is.
I had been under the impression that the reason to spend big bucks for an elite education in prep schools like Andover, Exeter, Choate, Deerfield, etc. was for a very rigorous classical education, traditional and strict moral standards, and, in general, a special culture set apart from ordinary society and its fads, from factory-style public education, and from ordinary mindless and immature teen pursuits.
If these sorts of schools no longer aspire to be different, what's the point?
So now Geoff Chaucer, the father of modern English, is voiceless and the whores have voices? Thus the culture progresses, forgetting the Wife of Bath - and the Whore of Babylon.
This came up the other day when I took the 64-bit version of Firefox out for a spin. Although it's basically the same program, they decided to rename it 'Nightly' and change the cute Firefox icons from this...
...to this wretched abomination:
This begs the question, why didn't they just rename it 'Bowling Ball'?
Using a free program called Resource Hacker, it's easy to change an ugly icon to something better. We shall delve into these digital wonders below the fold.
Pic: Finally! A computer system for people with 14 eyes!
Just to cover a few recent things that have popped up in my geeky little world:
Flash 64-bit Probs
I prefer using a 64-bit Windows system because it utilizes more of my machine's memory. The problem is that Flash, which until recently had a specific 64-bit version that worked just fine, now has a 'multi-system' version which doesn't. I've had various odd problems with both Internet Exploder and Firefox. If you're running a 64-bit system and having Flash probs, the best troubleshooting page I've come across is here. I think both #6 & 7 helped on this end.
Firefox 64-bit Probs
I'd never heard of a 64-bit Firefox, but I got to thinking about it, punched it into Google, and I'll be double-dipped if not only is there a 64-bit version, but that Mozilla officially killed it at one point — which naturally raised a huge outcry among its users and they brought it back. The sordid details are here. The 'official' release is still their multi-platform model; the 64-bit version is here if you want to give it a spin. Be forewarned that they not only changed the name from Firefox to 'Nightly', but changed the icon to something really horrid. The latter can be easily remedied; I'll have a post on changing the icon of an executable tomorrow. Note that you'll need the original EXE file for the original icon.
I've found over the years that I have two soap boxes I occasionally like clambering back on; system backup and getting your yourname.com domain before anyone else does. You only get one shot at it.
Gosh, if only them Congresscritters read Maggie's Farm, huh?
Live and learn, guys. More info on firing up your own domain here.
Security
You might have seen the plethora of articles this past week on temporarily disabling Java. Java is a 'helper' program for browsers (on every operating system, Mac and Linux users please note) so certain functions on a web site will work. It's also used widely by hackers to install malware on your system, and there's a whole new raft of bad stuff coming down the pike, hence the official alert to disable it.
Oracle, the home company, has just now released an update and it's strongly suggested you download & install it. The download site is here. Click the 'Download' button under 'JDK', click the 'Accept license' gadget, then the version for your particular system. Regular 32-bit Windows systems are 'Windows x86'.
I should note that some people think Java is so vulnerable that it should be re-written from the ground up — if not abandoned by web sites entirely — and they recommend you just flat-out disable it. Instructions are here; it's usually just the unchecking of a box. Speaking as a webmaster, I would note that Java isn't used very much these days and you probably won't notice a thing. If you were on some site which had a function you very much wanted to use but were getting a 'You need Java installed' message, you could always just flip it back on for a bit.
Any feedback or questions, give a holler in the comments like usual.
Winter is book season. What am I reading this week?
A classic: How To Run Any Organizationby Theodore Caplow. This splendid book is inexplicably out of print but used copies are readily available online for pennies. He covers everything from running a church choir to a medical practice to a corporate department.
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't. Nate Silver's new book.
It's the dumplings that make it worth eating. Good stuff. Otherwise, it's sort of like Chicken Soup or Chicken Stew, which are good if you have the flu but, otherwise, not too exciting.
A national "common core" for lower ed? I do not like that idea at all. I do not approve of any national authorities involved in education, much less curricula. Why do we have local school boards?
Gee, I almost forgot. We have them to apply for federal grants, which are, in turn, used to control state and local education from Washington.
Given the increasing centralization of everything, at least one fellow has something on the ball: David Coleman, Education Hero.
When young, most Americans never saw any tuna that did not come out of a can. Tuna Noodle was indeed a classic and, for Fridays, a Catholic standby. Cream of mushroom soup in it, of course: Tuna Noodle Casserole.
I would not want to eat it today unless I were starving. Was not even Catholic, just had enough of it.
Shucks, I almost forgot the notorious Tuna Surprise, aka Tuna Disappointment.
Italians do love their Mediterranean Tuna, and you can Google plenty of tasty Tuna sauce pasta recipes. Here's one: Italian Tuna and Pasta
Security came to my office this morning and said that they found a bucket with what appears to be medical waste in it in Driscoll Dining Hall. They thought it might an art project. It has been turned over to Health Services for testing to see if it’s real.
The failing of a central mission of the study of U.S. history--training future generations of American citizens--is, argues the NAS, based in a misunderstanding of the central mission of colleges and universities: that "they and particular programs within them increasingly think of themselves as responsible for reforming American society and curing it of prejudice and bigotry. When universities and university programs consider it necessary to atone for, and help erase, oppressions of the past, one way in which they do so is by depicting history as primarily a struggle of the downtrodden against rooted injustice . . . The dominance of race, class, and gender themes in history curricula came about through disciplinary mission creep. Historians and professors of United States history should return to their primary task: handing down the American story, as a whole, to future generations."
I've discussed the Gambler's Fallacy in the past (eg if you flip nine heads in a row, what are the odds the next toss will be a tail?). The inverse is another matter. Wiki gives this example:
Suppose a man walked into a room and saw someone rolling a pair of dice. Furthermore, imagine that the result of this dice roll is a double-six. The man entering the room would commit the Inverse Gambler's Fallacy if he said, "You've probably been rolling the dice for quite a while, since it's unlikely you would get a double-six on your first attempt."
Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, was a black guy. His Dad was a famous French general, born in Haiti (then Saint Domingue - Santo Domingo).
Alexandre's novel was based, in part, on his Dad who also had a grueling imprisonment after being captured by the Neapolitans in Taranto after being shipwrecked.
Tom Reiss researched this book for almost ten years.
...reflexive calls for Washington to pick up the tab underscore one of the greatest shifts of power in American politics during the last four decades: the transition from state and local autonomy to federal subsidy and control. This centralization of government was made possible largely by grants-in-aid, money provided by the federal government to state and local governments or private parties. They have become the third largest category in the federal budget, trailing only Social Security and national defense.
It's the best use of an inexpensive chuck roast or round. Pot Roast can be terrible dry mystery meat, or it can be OK. Pot Roast never looks very appealing, and should taste better than the pile of grey, well-overcooked meat looks.
More city co-eds turning to sugar daddies for school support
Pic: Finally! A computer system for people with 14 eyes! 
It's the dumplings that make it worth eating. Good stuff. Otherwise, it's sort of like Chicken Soup or Chicken Stew, which are good if you have the flu but, otherwise, not too exciting. 
When young, most Americans never saw any tuna that did not come out of a can. Tuna Noodle was indeed a classic and, for Fridays, a Catholic standby. Cream of mushroom soup in it, of course: 
Alexandre Dumas