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.
We recently posted a report of the closing of the last brownstone quarry in the US. Manhattan and Brooklyn have tons of old brownstone buildings, commonly entire blocks of them. Some people like the look and some do not, but it is not a very durable building stone.
I stumbled on this brownstone for sale on the Upper West Side (87th St, just off the Park). If I were a rich guy, I'd enjoy owning a place like this with the top floor used as living quarters for the help. Like most buildings from the era (1850-1910), each brownstone has a garden out back. Looks great from theoutside, but if you look at the video you'll hate what they did inside when converting it to apartments.
For every 100 industrial workers in December 2010, there were 73 “workers” receiving disability payments. Between January 2010 and December 2011, the U.S. economy created 1.73 million nonfarm jobs — but almost half as many (790,000) workers became disability recipients. This trend is not a Great Recession phenomenon: In the 15 years ending in December 2011, the United States added 8.8 million nonfarm private sector jobs — and 4.1 million workers on disability rolls.
10:46 They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside.
10:47 When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"
10:48 Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, "Son of David, have mercy on me!"
10:49 Jesus stood still and said, "Call him here." And they called the blind man, saying to him, "Take heart; get up, he is calling you."
10:50 So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus.
10:51 Then Jesus said to him, "What do you want me to do for you?" The blind man said to him, "My teacher, let me see again."
10:52 Jesus said to him, "Go; your faith has made you well." Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
I read in Mayflower about how the Pilgrims were astonished by the woodland autumn blaze of color. Europe doesn't have this. The storm will probably remove this year's magnificent display prematurely.
He also mentioned that America has 30 million Mayflower descendants. Not an exclusive club.
Wherever I go I hope there's rum! Think we'll just stay put and stand in awe of God and nature's power.
Jimmy's relentless good cheer is a blessing. It's a gift to the world, and I'd like all Maggie's Farmers to try to spread such good cheer and positivity to everybody in their lives. I try to do that all day long despite my innate Yankee reserve and crankiness.
Volcano, but same idea. However, I don't mind landing in no New York City. Love it despite being a country boy. Our gal Marianne did too.
This is for people using Internet Explorer on a 64-bit Windows 7 system. Everyone else, please skip to the next post. If you're not sure if you have a 32- or 64-bit system, right-click on 'Computer' and open Properties.
Internet Explorer remains an excellent browser, and, according to the tests I've made with online speed test sites, it outperforms Firefox, Chrome and Opera. I tried it again last night with SpeedTest, MegaPath and BandwidthPlace. As we say in the broadband biz, your mileage may vary.
IE's one big problem is that it opens links, like on the Desktop or in email, to a half-screen-size window. AutoSizer solves this annoying little problem by expanding Internet Explorer windows to full-screen size. It can do this with any program, and can also open small programs, like Calculator, in the center of the screen.
The problem is that it doesn't work on 64-bit Windows 7 systems. For those of you in this dire predicament, I have solved this mighty poser.
Tides are not all that easy to understand. For example, can you explain why there are no tides at the equator? It's complicated because the earth revolves and rotates, the moon revolves on an angle to the equator, and then there's the sun too. Lots of moving parts. Plus local factors.
My need to refresh my understanding arises because hurricane Sandy, who will likely be visiting the northeast somewhere between Chesapeake Bay and Boston at the end of this weekend, is coming during a full moon - the Hunter's Moon as the redskin Injuns termed it.
(The latest tracking guesses show it mostly missing New England and turning inland somewhere between Delmarva and Jersey. Meteorologists love this sort of unusual weather event. I heard one on the radio saying that he had always wondered why conditions were so rare for a storm to make a left turn due to a low cold front sucking in a storm. The Weather Nerd is following things, and posted this pic showing the Clash of Titans - the polar cold front and Sandy:)
Full Moons indicate that the moon and the sun are on the same side of the earth, illuminating the moon, and New Moons when they are pulling from opposite sides. Thus both of these phases exaggerate the tidal effect by combining lunar with solar gravity. They're called Spring Tides.
In Maggie's Farm's part of the world, high tide and low tide vary from 6-10' in each tide change, and increase around 20% during Spring Tides. Thus a storm surge during a Spring Tide is likely to cause more damage and flooding to structures (ie, structures which are built where they don't belong in the first place - on coastal beaches, waterfronts, flood plains, and on old marshes covered with a thin layer of fill back before the laws were changed).
Storm surges in New England, whether from Nor'easters or the occasional hurricane, can be 5-10 feet above high tide. A very large or slow-moving storm can effect more than one tide cycle.
Re storm prep, I fetched a fresh bottle of Dalwhinnie, some smokes, charcoal for cooking, good veggies to grill, and I topped off my gas can for the chain saw so I don't get trapped here by fallen trees and limbs. Firewood? Check. My ancient, second-hand diesel generator seems to be on the blink, but we can cope. Sometimes it will start if I kick it in the kidneys while pushing the button.
Meanwhile, I eagerly await the first lunatic to blame the storm on global warmingclimate change HotColdWetDry, as the Pirate terms it.
Barack Obama may win or lose the election in ten days, but, in either case, he will emerge much diminished by the sort of disgusting, mendacious, fear-mongering, low-life campaign he has run. A new low for the Presidency.
Watching the final debate, the more I considered Barack Obama's deplorably non-presidential affect and attitude; his reliance on corny, crudely-made zingers; and his almost pathological string of lies and distortions, the more it struck me that, at some level, he knows this is over. His speeches since then show an edge that belies the old “No Drama Obama” who was going to heal the bitter partisan divisions of the past.
The aura of a losing campaign is unique...
and
Romney is drawing astounding crowds at event after event – Denver's Red Rocks event was at standing-room only and over 25,000 people were turned away. This story is repeated almost daily: Romney is drawing the kind of crowds Barack Obama pulled in 2008. The momentum isn'ta bluff or a headfake; Republicans are lit up in the same way they were in 2010. It's happening in Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Nevada and all the battleground states.
Obama is largely reduced to trawling college campuses for political jailbait, stroking the shreds of his coalition in the increasingly desperate hope of getting at least a few salvageable video clips out of each day. Big Bird, binders, and bayonets don't comprise a sweeping vision of a second Obama term and it shows. Vice-President Malaprop wanders Ohio diners, touching people's food and getting biker chicks to sit in his lap. It's a campaign in trouble, and they know it.
Over the last four years, Obama’s faithful could and did blame third parties — the banks, the rich, Bush, Congress, Israel, the tea party, the Olympic committee, etc. — for nearly all of the president’s failures. They were fighting for themselves as much as they were fighting for Obama. But many gave up the fight on October 3.
The pinup girl of Maggie's Farm, Marianne Matthews, who in so many ways epitomized our ideals, educated the uncouth, and lifted our spirits has died. I and you hadn't heard from her in a month or so. I just phoned the police in the city where she lived and they checked her house. She passed about a month ago. Her dear husband (87), who had been failing, is now in a nursing home. (If anyone is in the Houston area and is able to do a bit of traveling nearby, please email me via the Comments and I'll get back to you offline.)
Here's a photo she sent me in 2011, when Marianne was 82, with a, to use Marianne's description, "surrogate daughter." Marianne never had children of her own, unless you count the thousands and thousands who have known and loved her.
Marianne was a highly trained and accomplished musician, as well as a highly educated lady (Columbia). Several years ago she sent me photos of her first guitar that her father bought her as a child. Marianne also was a noted folksinger during the 1940s and 1950s. Several years ago a friend of hers rescued some tapes of her singing in the 1950s. I chose one cut, "The Last Rose Of Summer", and uploaded it and a photo of Marianne (when she was 44, taken in 1972) to Youtube. Here it is. With love to a very lovely lady. They don't make roses like that anymore. We are all saddened and diminished by her passing.
If you care to share your memories of Marianne, please Comment.
Here's the lyric to "The Last Rose Of Summer" and a bit about the poem.
'Tis the last rose of summer, Left blooming alone; All her lovely companions Are faded and gone; No flower of her kindred, No rosebud is nigh, To reflect back her blushes, Or give sigh for sigh.
I'll not leave thee, thou lone one! To pine on the stem; Since the lovely are sleeping, Go, sleep thou with them. Thus kindly I scatter, Thy leaves o'er the bed, Where thy mates of the garden Lie scentless and dead.
So soon may I follow, When friendships decay, And from Love's shining circle The gems drop away. When true hearts lie withered, And fond ones are flown, Oh! who would inhabit This bleak world alone?
The cumulative evidence is now evident to all with even bad eyesight that Benghazi is sad proof of what conservative critics have been saying for the past four years, that President Obama, his appointees and administration lack the dedication, insight and guts to defend the United States honorably or resolutely.
Democrats were known as the Party of national security weakness for a generation after their betrayal of South Vietnam and Jimmy Carter’s callowness in the face of the Iranian radicals. Aging memories, war tiredness, and big lies from the Obama administration managed to recover some national security credibility.
Now, it’ll take another generation for Democrats to, depending upon circumstances, recover some national security credibility. How focused and resolute Republicans behave will be important. Otherwise, abandon all hope for the US.
The latest revelation of betrayal of the men on the ground fighting desperately in Benghazi makes every veteran I know furious, makes every conservative voice howl in anger, but has yet to break the silence at Yahoo News, Washington Post, New York Times. They may be trying to run out the clock to November 6. That finger in the dike will not hold, possibly before November 6 and certainly after. The maggots in the chain of command in the White House, Pentagon, State Dept., and CIA responsible deserve to have their names engraved on a prominent monument to cowardice.
When you are fighting for this country, you run to the sound of the fire and the calls for help. If someone tries to tell you not to go, and you know people are dying, you go anyway. If you don't know all the facts on the ground, as Panetta claimed, you go anyway. You go because the rule has always been that when you are in trouble and call for help, help will get there as quickly and overwhelmingly as humanly possible. You go for them because you know they would come for you. If it ever becomes known that the cavalry will not be coming to your rescue, then you will tell them where to stick it when they ask you to put your butt on the line. When the day comes, and now it may have, when it is known that we are not willing to sacrifice more casualties in an effort, no matter how futile it may be, to respond to pleas for help from the men on the line, we will no longer have men willing to put themselves on that line. Fix it now, before those men, in whom so much confidence is placed, lose confidence in us.
Windows 8 has just been released. For those of you with desktop (aka 'normal') computers, here's all you need to know about Windows 8:
For Microsoft, the existential crisis is the movement away from traditional desktop computing.
I wrote a review on the beta version here. It's morphed into an operating system designed for tablet computers, but as I note in the review:
The one big downside to the 'quickie' areas is that they're too simplistic. The weather just gives a few stats, but no radar map where you can gauge any oncoming rain clouds, which might be the most common reason to suddenly want to check the weather while on the road. So, you end up using your regular browser to access your usual weather site. Ditto the 'Stocks' area, and the 'News' feeds are restricted to just what's listed, and the little synopsis in the small tablet box usually doesn't say enough to explain what the article is about.
So even the things that make it handy and tablet-y are semi-worthless. And while the Desktop is still available for 'normal' computer work, it's missing a few things. Otherwise, it's just Windows 7 right down to the exit sound.
My guess is that the New Wave crowd — those who just gotta have the latest trinket, like a tablet computer — will rave about it, but otherwise I think it'll be something of a flop. Regular (also known as 'normal') computer users will just stare at the opening screen...
...and wonder why the hell they should want to check the weather (when a glance out the window should suffice) or their vast stock portfolio (that's your stock broker's job) when all they want to do is get their damn email and hang out on the web for a while.
If you have, or are thinking of buying, a tablet computer, by all means read some reviews and buy the best tablet software. If you're just a regular ol' slob like me using one of them archaic desktop computers, forget you just wasted two minutes reading this post. Sorry. Blame Microsoft.
...a growing body of research controlling for variables outside of aid supports the hypothesis that aid has an appreciable inflationary effect, though study results vary by type of aid and institution.
Like most individuals, institutions can always find new "needs" to spend money on. About three years ago, my alma mater announced a $600 million bequest. Two months later, their fund plea arrived in the mail, hoping I would increase my annual donation.
Did they lower tuition? No. For greedy government and greedy non-profits, it's never enough and never will be.
THE DETERMINISTIC GUIDANCE (PARTICULARLY THE 00Z ECMWF) SHOW PRESSURE SOLUTIONS WELL BEYOND WHAT HAS EVER BEEN OBSERVED NEAR THE NEW JERSEY/NEW YORK COAST (EVEN EXCEEDING THE 1938 LONG ISLAND EXPRESS HURRICANE) EARLY IN THE MEDIUM RANGE PERIOD.
This is what climate change looks like! The Pilgrims experienced one of these. Stock up on canned goods and batteries cigars, beer, charcoal for the grill, and gas for the chain saw. If Maggie's server is down next week, the storm will be why.
Three states form the base of Democratic political power in the United States: California, New York and Illinois. All three states are locked in an accelerating economic, demographic and social decline; all three hope that they can stave off looming disaster at home by exporting the policies that have ruined them to the rest of the country....
and
Illinois politicians, including the present President of the United States, have wrecked one of the country’s potentially most prosperous and dynamic states, condemned millions of poor children to substandard education, failed to maintain vital infrastructure, choked business development and growth through unsustainable tax and regulatory policies — and still failed to appease the demands of the public sector unions and fee-seeking Wall Street crony capitalists who make billions off the state’s distress.
There are some major races in some states that are so predetermined that the opposing party has a sacrificial candidate. That's the case in California, where longtime US Senator Diane Feinstein (D) is an easy win for re-election. Feinstein is not so in-your-face obnoxious as her fellow California US Senator Barbara Boxer, and occasionally seems moderate. But, get down to the votes in the Senate and Feinstein is a party-line liberal. Her opponent on November 6 is Elizabeth Emken. In another race, Emken's personality and positions would be a winner. Feinstein has not even deigned to debate Emken.
Via a tip from Bookie (whose mother has a decades-old gripe against "lazy" Diane Feinstein), here's Emken's mock-up debate with Feinstein. If for no other reason, watch the 2-minutes so you'll be aware of Emken next time:
As you might have heard, a court in Italy has convicted seven scientists of manslaughter because they failed to predict an earthquake that struck some village and killed a bunch of people.
People living in non-earthquake-reinforced buildings in an area known for having violent earthquakes, I might add.
An Italian court sentenced scientists to jail time for not having a functioning crystal ball ahead of the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila. The arguments of science and reason fell on deaf ears. Rarely since a Catholic inquisition in Rome condemned Galileo Galilei to spend the remainder of his days under house arrest for the heresy of teaching that the Earth revolves around the sun has an Italian court been so wrong about science.
Today, a court in the central Italian city of L'Aquila, 380 years after that miscarriage of justice, sentenced six scientists and a government bureaucrat to six years in jail [and $10.2 million in fines] on manslaughter charges for their failure to predict a 2009 earthquake that left more than 300 people dead.
More articles on this travesty of justice, sensibility and reason:
Most recent NOAA storm prediction for the Northeastern US here.
Looks like they predict a major Nor'easter fueled by Hurricane Sandy. The dramatic prediction of perfect storm conditions will likely be wrong but heck, it's time to get your boat out of the water now anyway.
Humans aren't Bonobos, but in human connections there is always some sex in the air. The popularity of "friends with benefits" relationships among the youth, and now middle-aged singles - makes that clear. Lots of other things are in the air too, like competitiveness, childish emotional wishes, familial-type feelings, feelings of tribal affiliation. loneliness, delight or amusement in another's company, shared intellectual or recreational fun, exploitative aspirations, etc., etc.
My profound and earth-shaking point here is simply that human interactions and connections partake of all aspects of being ... human.
There's one thing I know for sure: Put a guy and a gal who are pals in a comfy place away from home, add alcohol, stir, and anything can happen. Alcohol numbs the prefrontal cortex.
I have never before endorsed a Republican for President, I call for the election of Mitt Romney to the nation’s highest office.
Don Harrison is the editor of the San Diego Jewish World, widely influential in this area and widely read elsewhere. Don Harrison is what I have often called him, "an open-minded liberal." Indeed, he has often published me! He is thoroughly politically liberal, and can be counted upon to with very rare exception endorse the Democrat candidate for any office. However, in the case of Romney Vs Obama, Harrison tells me that he agonized for a long time. The deciding factors for Harrison are that Obama can't be trusted to be a firm supporter of Israel in its existential danger from the development of Iranian nuclear weapons while Romney can be trusted more, and that domestically Harrison feels that there will be enough constraints on social conservative agendas to avoid the worst fears raised by Democrats during the campaign.
Instead of seeing college as a private investment, we must consider it a public good. If we remember the generation that was educated after World War II, generous public support meant that they could afford -- economically -- to spend four years studying the subject that most interested or spoke to them, and then they took their education and did millions of things with it that helped us develop a richer society, not just in terms of wealth but in terms of knowledge, art, and citizenship. That generation could do so because they did not have to take on thousands of dollars in debt and to worry all the time about how to pay for it. They could do so because public support for their education -- meaning low tuition for students thanks to tax support for America’s colleges -- gave them the freedom -- the leisure -- to study.
While I am somewhat sympathetic to the feeling of the article, I also find it foolish in several ways.
First, it is not only the elites who have access to the liberal arts. With 70% of current job seekers holding higher ed degrees, that no longer applies.
Second, any public high school offers an abundant introduction to the liberal arts, enough to prepare anybody to pursue their intellectual interests for the rest of their lives.
Third, "leisure to study"? That's ridiculous. Full-time college offers leisure to drink, to attend football games, and to pursue the opposite sex. Best students I've known had no leisure.
Fourth, the idea of a "public good." Last I heard, that just means that somebody else ought to pay for it, preferably my neighbor via taxation. Why my neighbor should pay for my kid to "pursue at leisure the things that speak to him" is utterly beyond me.
This is for people using Internet Explorer on a 64-bit Windows 7 system. Everyone else, please skip to the next post. If you're not sure if you have a 32- or 64-bit system, right-click on 'Computer' and open Properties.
Tides are not all that easy to understand. For example, can you explain why there are no tides at the equator? It's complicated because the earth revolves and rotates, the moon revolves on an angle to the equator, and then there's the sun too. Lots of moving parts. Plus local factors.
Tsk-tsk, Italy.