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.
According to Mises, “The profit system [of the free market] makes those men prosper who have succeeded in filling the wants of the people in the best possible and cheapest way.” The free market is a daily plebiscite, he explained, in which “every penny gives a right to vote … who should own and run the plants, shops and farms.” Rather than giving everyone an equal share in running the economy, the free market places in charge those best able to provide for the many. In this arrangement, everyone must produce. Everyone buys and sells. “This is what the modern concept of freedom means,” noted Mises. “Every adult is free to fashion his life according to his own plans.
In the early 1900s, nearly 80 percent of Americans over the age of 65 had a job. Dora Costa, an economic historian at UCLA, says people stopped working only if they were no longer physically able to. They expected to work as long as they lived.
Is that really such a terrible idea?
Social Security was partly designed to prevent the frail elderly, those presumably abandoned by their families, from starving in the gutters. A secondary purpose was to nudge older folks out of the job market during the Depression. Of course, the Ponzi scheme vote-buying motive was there too.
Thus was the utopian concept of "retirement" sold to the American people. Today, for most people, Social Security is just one factor in their retirement equation, and everybody is expected to have a "retirement plan," as if work and productivity were something to escape.
I happen to be one of those fortunate people who likes to work. I like any sort of work. Retirement has zero appeal to me, although more vacation time does appeal to me. My goal is 4 weeks off per year.
Our resident blog critic says it's a dumb article. Here's the article: Against Chairs. A quote:
I hate to piss on the party, but chairs suck. All of them. No designer has ever made a good chair, because it is impossible. Some are better than others, but all are bad. Not only are chairs a health hazard, they also have a problematic history that has inextricably tied them to our culture of status-obsessed individualism. Worse still, we’ve become dependent on them and it’s not clear that we’ll ever be free.
It sounds absurd to claim that chairs are dangerous.
Since it's a topic I have posted about a couple of times in the past, I'd like to highlight it. A quote:
It makes one think: If the lawyers are designing the health-care system, shouldn’t they be forced to operate under regulations similar to those they’re imposing? How, for example, do lawyers get paid? Today, they negotiate fees with clients. That hardly seems fair. In health care, doctors don’t negotiate fees with patients, they get paid according to an opaque schedule determined by health plans. Lawyers should do the same. The solution is “legal insurance”. After all, who amongst us knows when we’ll need a lawyer? It is often an unpredictable expense, and yet the “market” seems to have failed to provide such insurance. Government must intervene.
I have been an American all of my life, and I still cannot figure out whether Americans want freedom or freebies. Probably both, but that does not work.
This is a story of brazen administration action of dubious legality undertaken with transparently corrupt purposes. Yet it has received amazingly little coverage. You might almost think we lacked a free press or something.
He is like a pro with Photoshop. As readers can tell from my snapshots, I have never used that program. I have neither the time nor the interest. What I snap is what I get. Were I an artist, I would paint pictures.
These things have all of these buttons and menus. Who wants to bother with that? OK, call me a luddite.
Their "anti-greed message"? What? Seems to me they just want my money and my stuff, so who is greedy? I do not want anybody else's money or stuff. If they wish to purchase something I produce, fine. It's for sale.
Unthinking is the ability to apply years of learning at the crucial moment by removing your thinking self from the equation. Its power is not confined to sport: actors and musicians know about it too, and are apt to say that their best work happens in a kind of trance. Thinking too much can kill not just physical performance but mental inspiration. Bob Dylan, wistfully recalling his youthful ability to write songs without even trying, described the making of “Like a Rolling Stone” as a “piece of vomit, 20 pages long”. It hasn’t stopped the song being voted the best of all time.
Throughout the opening decades of the 20th century, American liberals engaged in a spirited critique of Americanism, a condition they understood as the pursuit of mass prosperity by an energetic but crude, grasping people chasing their private ambitions without the benefit of a clerisy to guide them. In thrall to their futile quest for material well-being, and numbed by the popular entertainments that appealed to the lowest common denominator in a nation of immigrants, Americans were supposedly incapable of recognizing the superiority of European culture as defined by its literary achievements.
This critique gave rise to the ferment of the 1920s, described by the literary critic Malcolm Cowley as the “exciting years…when…the young intellectuals seized power in the literary world almost like the Bolsheviks in Russia.” The writers Cowley referred to—Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Waldo Frank especially—had “a vague belief in aristocracy” and a sense that they were being “oppressed” by the culture of Main Street. But they believed America could be rescued from the pits of its popular culture by secular priests of sufficient insight to redeem the country from the depredations of the mass culture produced by democracy and capitalism. They were championed not only by leftists such as Cowley, but also by Nietzscheans such as H.L. Mencken, the critic and editor whom Walter Lippmann described in 1926 as “the most powerful influence on this whole generation of educated people” who famously mocked the hapless “herd,” “the imbeciles,” the “booboisie,” all of whom he deemed the “peasantry” that blighted American cultural life.
They seem to be raising their chicks on pigeons, mostly. Squab is tasty. I've had it several times. Best was with the breast served on top of the liver, with a great liver and sage sauce. I see a sparrow carcass there too. It's amusing to see how the chicks use their future wings as arms.
Thus far, I have seen, in their pantry, meadow vole, bunny rabbit, seagull, sparrow, and plenty of pigeons. No tofu and no vegetables at all.
Parenthood is hard work, and often boring. How loving and devoted are these parents, though? They trade off in warming and feeding the nestlings.
1: The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. 2: He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. 3: He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. 4: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. 5: Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. 6: Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.
It's the time of year for us to ask our readers, whether occasional or devoted followers, to introduce our website to your friends, neighbors, countrymen, colleagues, etc.
We always want more eyeballs. That's our reward for our efforts - besides our own enjoyment and self-education. We learn things from doing this, and maybe you learn something from reading us.
We may be a boutique, eclectic site and certainly not to everybody's taste, but I have even got my Massachusetts Obama-lib sis reading us, so that's something.
I recently learned from a Maggie's pal visiting China that we are blocked there. Why? Anyway, we aren't blocked anywhere else, so do us a favor and send us around. A little freedom-loving New England Yankee influence can only be a good thing for the world.
A group of students at the University of California, San Diego, claim exclusive rights to wear clown costumes, and accuse anyone else wearing one to be clownaphobic. Ridiculous, right?
Then, keep reading.
After the anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine at UCSD lost the vote in the student government for divestment from Israel, they have turned to baseless and in this case utterly absurd attacks upon anti-divestment members of the campus.
First they made up charges against a music professor that he’d intimidated a student, which the official UCSD Office of Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination investigated, clearing the professor.
Now, beclowning themselves, SJP member Noor El-Annan and cohorts accuse a campus-wide elected member of the student government, Ashton Cohen, who voted against divestment, of being Islamaphobic, denigrating Moslems, and being culturally insensitive. The pretext: the student Senator wore an Arabic costume at a costume party.
The student is a Persian Jew, with Moslem family members. He bought the outfit in Dubai, and wore it there for comfort when it was very hot. On that same trip, as a guest of the Indian government along with other US student government leaders, he’d also bought Indian garb, but it was at his family’s house in L.A. If he’d worn that Indian garb, would he be Indianaphobic? Ridiculous.
At the costume party a photo was taken of him, along with three female friends, two of whom are Moslem. One of the females posted the photo with a humorous subtitle, “three wives?” That’s what the pro-Palestinian fanatics call an insult to Moslem polygamy practices. Would they have preferred photos of clitorectomies, which is also a common Moslem practice?
When I was a kid, we referred to the Upland Sandpiper as a "snipe." They used to be officially named "Upland Plover." It's been a long time since I have seen an Upland Sandpiper in New England. (They are listed as threatened in the Eastern US). They were more plentiful in the past, when Yankeeland was covered with pastures and hayfields.
As with the Bobolink and the Meadowlark, reforestation and suburbanization have taken their toll on these fine meadow dwellers in the northeastern US. The Upland Sandpiper also had to deal with heavy market hunting (as a substitute for the hunted-to-extinction Passenger Pigeon).
The Upland, like our Wilson's Snipe, Woodcock, and Europe's Jacksnipe are all members of the shorebird family Scolopacidae who abandoned the coasts and found a home in the uplands. These birds are still hunted, much as all shorebirds were in the past. However, they are difficult to find these days.
Our Upland Sandpipers winter on the Argentinian pampas. You can read more about the Upland Sandpiper here.
Here's a male Bobolink in breeding plumage, aka Ricebird. They do breed in one of our largest pastures. I still remember the first one I heard calling.
From 
Hey Jude, 
A photo nut pal loves this new one he's been using: 
"Sometimes thinking is a bad idea.
It's the time of year for us to ask our readers, whether occasional or devoted followers, to introduce our website to your friends, neighbors, countrymen, colleagues, etc.
When I was a kid, we referred to the Upland Sandpiper as a "snipe." They used to be officially named "Upland Plover." It's been a long time since I have seen an Upland Sandpiper in New England. (They are 