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 question of the Bush Tax cuts 'causing' the deficits, and hence the 'need' to increase taxes on the 'wealthy' is one which Democrats spend many evenings discussing. Clearly, Bush was an insane tax-cutter without any good ideas and caused every problem mankind faces today, and frankly every problem we've faced for the last 40 years. He was just that bad.
However, a non-partisan look at the cuts indicates something quite different. On a standalone basis, taking out all other additional spending programs from the last 11 years, what we find is the tax cuts paid for themselves, and then some. In other words, the issue isn't the cuts. The issue is all the additional spending which took place after the cuts. To be completely honest, and completely fair, not all the spending was by Bush, either. In fact, most of it was voted on with bipartisan support. Very little could be said to be purely Bush-related, let alone Republican-related.
Honesty is a difficult thing in politics. Typically I don't look for anything more than a minimal degree of it, what I prefer is a level of consistency of thought. The Republicans have their own challenges regarding honesty and consistency, but the Democrats have really done a good job of cornering the market on dishonesty and hypocrisy.
I've been busy the last few days with management meetings, mostly running from office to office and keeping people happy. However, there was a full day off-site meeting recently on the 44th floor of a relatively new high-rise on 57th Street. We had the entire floor to ourselves, and before the meetings got underway, I walked around and snapped a few pictures. Here's one:
A good view of the Hudson, Jersey City in the distance, down 8th Avenue from 57th. As I snapped this, I noticed several other people in the room doing the same thing. I laughed, and commented, "Isn't it strange, we've all lived in the New York area for years, we've been in so many skyscrapers, and here we are taking pictures?" One woman, who lives in Manhattan, replied "Yes, but you need to do this to remind yourself just how special it is sometimes. We tend to take it for granted." I agree. We don't usually stop to enjoy what we've got available to us.
George Leef is not convinced that many jobs which require a BA have any need for it. What is a BA anyway? He begins:
Why go to college? Go back fifty years, and the answer commonly given was, "To become a well-rounded person who has a grasp of our civilization's history, science, and art." Go back about twenty-five years and the answer commonly given was, "So you'll be able to get a good job." And now one authoritative source is telling us, "Because you'll be better off when the next recession hits."
We saw it during the 1984 performance at the BAM. It's a memorable, hypnotic theater experience, a collaboration between Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, and choreographer Lucinda Childs.
4 1/2 hrs, no intermission, but you can come and go as you please. Wine and snacks in the lobby throughout.
When performed at NYC's Metropolitan Opera in 1976, Einstein was remarkable in its theatrical innovations, but many of them have since been absorbed into the mainstream.
If you are interested in music, theater, or dance, I would still say that it is not to be missed. However, it ain't a Broadway-type performance. I wouldn't call it highbrow - just unique. It sort-of washes over you in dreamlike fashion. I found the visual imagery to be unforgettable. It is a dream, a spectacle. A non-theater and -dance person might get bored without smoking a little weed first. Little snippets of it at the link above.
I cannot let my kids miss this. Worth a trip from almost anywhere.
Ah, there's nothing quite like living in the beautiful Florida Keys. The clear, blue Atlantic outside our door. The gentle ocean breeze wafting through the palm trees. The lovely wahines serving drinks at the local tiki bar.
Yes, you simply couldn't ask for a more peaceful, tranquil existence.
"I simply do not know where the money is... I do not know which accounts are unreconciled or whether the unreconciled accounts were, or were not, subject to the segregation rules." - Jon Corzine
With a little luck, both the brain and the mind can continue to mature throughout life - until decay sets in. A life trajectory is never set in stone. The brain will mature as it will, but the maturation of the mind and the emotions requires effort, discipline, and, most of all, rigorous self-criticism.
The authors of the book in question believe that happiness comes from not working. That seems kind of strange, because I always felt that the foundation of happiness came from being useful and productive. A quote from the review:
The authors offer suggestions for how to change the balance between work and leisure. First, everyone should receive either a wage from the government (with no obligation to work to earn it) generous enough to enable him to work only part time, or a capital endowment at birth; the risk of people squandering their endowment in “riotous living can be reduced by limiting their spending to approved objects (such as education)”; in addition, the schools would educate people for leisure. Second, they recommend imposing a progressive consumption tax, to make consumer products more costly in the hope of discouraging people from working hard to be able to afford them (it could of course make them work even harder). Third, firms should be forbidden to deduct advertising expenditures from taxable income, since advertising encourages consumption.
But here is the oddest thing about the book: There is virtually no discussion of how people, their incomes halved, might be expected to employ the vastly greater leisure that the authors want them to have.
Don't ya love those would-be utopian societal planners? The authors of the book must live in some alternate universe. We can't all be Michelangelos, nor would most people decide to be.
In The Secret of Amazon.com I reveal how one can buy older books for upward of an entire penny, assuming your wallet coin purse can withstand such a blow.
Well, I found out something even more amazing about Amazon.com the other day. This tale won't just introduce you to some new product or service; it'll introduce you to an entire new genre of item that you probably never even knew existed...
...and, if you own a printer and do much printing, you might want to very much.
"Crap! Out of printer ink again? What? Cyan? How the hell can I be out of cyan if I haven't printed anything in color in over a year?!?"
You probably know the feeling.
What happens is that every time you turn the printer on, or even in mid-print if it feels the need, it cleans the printer heads. And every time it cleans the heads, it shoots a little ink down the nozzle and, after you add up a bucketload of cleanings, you're out of cyan. Or magenta. Or yellow.
Again.
So you cruise into Office Depot. $63 for the 4-pack. Hmm. Clearly, there must be a better way.
You check the Office Depot online site. $56. Hmm. Clearly, there must be a better way.
(you're repetitious, but thorough)
So you check Amazon.com. Ah-ha! $31. Now we're talkin'. You sniff around the page and see an "11 new from $27.20" link and figure you've hit rock bottom. $63 down to $27 in five minutes? Not bad, you old pro, you.
Then it happens.
That's when you spot the link next to it, and you humbly realize that, as smart and seasoned a shopper as you are, there's an entire genre of ink cartridges out there that you never even knew existed:
Used ink cartridges.
And, no, I just couldn't stop myself. The ad's gone now (there was only one in stock), but I grabbed the 4-pack listed for — are you ready — $9.95.
It arrived yesterday and all four cartridges are brand new inside of their factory-sealed vacuum packs. The reason they're sold as 'used' is because they're not in their nice little 4-pack box.
If they want to re-create their homeland's moral hell-holes in Europe, why did they bother to leave home? Oh. The Welfare checks and the multicultural embrace.
...nowadays there is a new science of happiness, and some of the psychologists and almost all the economists involved want you to think that happiness is just pleasure. Further, they propose to calculate your happiness, by asking you where you fall on a three-point scale, 1-2-3: “not too happy,” “pretty happy,” “very happy.” They then want to move to technical manipulations of the numbers, showing that you, too, can be “happy,” if you will but let the psychologists and the economists show you (and the government) how.
On a long view, understand, it is only recently that we have been guiltlessly obsessed with either pleasure or happiness. In secular traditions, such as the Greek or the Chinese, a pleasuring version of happiness is downplayed, at any rate in high theory, in favor of political or philosophical insight. The ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi observed of some goldfish in a pond, “See how happy they are!” A companion replied, “How do you know they are happy?” Zhuangzi: “How do you know I don’t know?” In Christianity, for most of its history, the treasure, not pleasure, was to be stored up in heaven, not down here where thieves break in. After all, as a pre-eighteenth-century theologian would put it—or as a modern and mathematical economist would, too—an infinite afterlife was infinitely to be preferred to any finite pleasure attainable in earthly life.
And
Ominously... happiness studies have been diverted into an applied science. The happiness measurers very much want to direct us and are itching to engineer a happy society. They do not know what they are talking about, but are very willing to put “policies” about it into practice anyway. In a finely argued but erroneous book of philosophy, for example, Daniel Haybron a few years ago made a case partly on the basis of the new science of happiness against what he calls “liberal optimism,” or the belief since the eudaemonic movement and the bourgeois revaluations of the eighteenth century that “people tend to fare best—and pretty well at that—when empowered to shape their [own] lives.” He doubts it. But on what basis, since psychology is singularly ill-equipped to yield such doubt? As Haybron himself points out, tests on college kids do not range across enough experience. History is more to the point. Of course people make mistakes about their lives, and sometimes spend their lives badly. But as even Haybron acknowledges, the liberal experiment since 1700 has yielded gigantically better lives in every sense for a constantly increasing number of us. Haybron, and many of the elite critics of how other people spend their time on Earth, is an admitted pastoralist and disdains the sick hurry of modern life. Yet is he himself not living a happy life, which his ancestor around 1800—who in any case died in childhood and childbirth—did not?
It's a major essay. As I have said here many times, "happiness" cannot be defined in an applicable way beyond simple-minded gratification, but unhappiness is easy to recognize. It's everywhere.
They have to, because of all the things people want to get from government (ie from their hard-working neighbors' pockets). As Bruce said earlier today, government has become the god to whom many pray for the stuff they want to make life easier. Utopia is always just around the corner if only people sacrifice a little bit more for the Common Good.
Quickest things to deal with the debt? Cancel Obamacare, reform Medicare and Social Security, and unshackle the economy so we can get some growth going. While they're at it, shutter the Dept of Education, shutter the Commerce Dept, cancel Dodd-Frank, let GM, Fannie and Freddie go bankrupt, and trust-bust the giant banks if they are too big to fail because if I want to invest in a bank, I will do it on my own. Almost forgot one detail: vote out Obama.
“You didn’t build that!” is probably the most preposterous statement I have ever heard from an American politician. A high bar to clear, no doubt, but let me justify the choice. It puts the effect before the cause. Suppose someone were to say, “If it weren’t for cities, there wouldn’t be such things as big family farms,” and therefore farmers owe it to city-dwellers to hand over more of their profits. But the farmer could well reply, “If it weren’t for farms, there would be no such things as cities,” and that is absolutely correct; without a surplus of food that can be stored, no city can exist. The farm is the foundation of the city, and not the reverse.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy studied "How America Gives." One of the study's charts shows a remarkable difference: "Red states are more generous than blue states. The eight states where residents gave the highest share of income to charity went for John McCain in 2008. The seven-lowest ranking states supported Barack Obama."
Yankee Northeasterners are cheapskates: "In states like Utah and Mississippi, the typical household gives more than 7 percent of its income to charity, while the average household in Massachusetts and three other New England states gives less than 3 percent."
What's the bottom-line?: "The reasons for the discrepancies among states, cities, neighborhoods are rooted in part in each area’s political philosophy about the role of government versus charity."
Tom Stoppard 
The authors of the book in question believe that happiness comes from not working. That seems kind of strange, because I always felt that the foundation of happiness came from being useful and productive. A quote 
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Deirdre McCloskey on 
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