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.
I've seen the embattled winds hurtle together, Uprooting, tossing high and scattering The lush-eared crop; then the onrushing gale With black tornado carry off light stalk And flying stubble. Oft advances huge A host of waters in the sky, and clouds, Gathering from the sea, marshal the storm, Foul, dark with rain. Down pour the heavens sheer, In mighty flood sweeping away glad crops And labours of the ox. The ditches fill: Deep rivers rise in thundering spate: the seas Breathe and boom in the narrows. Jove himself, In blackest darkness of the storm-cloud, wields With flickering hand his bolt, at whose dread shock Earth trembles, wild things scurry, and stark fear Lays prostrate, nation-wide, the hearts of men.
From A Farmer's Calendar, 40 BC. (You can spell Vergilius' name as Vergil or Virgil)
The main drag on the isola is an alley (pic from a couple of years ago). Our advice in Italty: Never eat the pizza. Terrible stuff. Sit down someplace and grab a gelato and a tiny coffee instead. Hazelnut gelato is my favorite.
Last night, I helped my son prepare an Op-Ed piece for his high school class on Economics and Financial Literacy. He chose the Durable Goods report, and we sat down to dissect and discuss what it told us. As a neophyte, he naturally saw discussion of "Shipments rising" and "Orders increasing" and asked "this means things are getting better, right? We're in an uptrend?" Linear thinking is easy. Being human, we do it all the time.
Yes, I told him, but there's much more to the report. I pointed out that Inventories were growing rapidly, Unfilled Orders were increasing, and while Shipments were increasing, the rate of increase was slowing. None of these are particularly good signs of future activity. More importantly, Capital Goods, the building blocks of future productivity, were declining. At best, we decided, the report was neutral, showing that things may have improved somewhat, but many other signs were indicating a stall or slowdown.
Most importantly, I pointed him to the Inventory-to-Sales Ratio, which is a harbinger of true economic activity. A rapidly climbing ratio does not forebode good times, but rather difficulty with pricing and sales in the future. As consumers, we rarely pay attention to what goes on 'behind the veil' with items like inventories. We like our answers pat, easy and predictable. It's a shame they never are.
The case for rewarding performance is that we can do it, not that it is the same as rewarding merit. Likewise, holding individuals personally responsible for the consequences of their own actions is a social expedient for prospective control, not a cosmic retrospective moral judgment.
When I was young I affected to believe that to look a mess was a sign of inner profundity. I made the mistake of supposing that if the wise are bearded, the bearded are wise. If I adopted the supposed manner of an artist, therefore, I too would be an artist, or at least artistic. And, conveniently enough, the sloppiness of inner profundity required no effort on my part. As everyone knows, a lot of human history consists of man’s attempt to escape effort.
Here at Maggie's, we might be termed "skeptics" but, when it comes to climate, we're really of the "Who cares?" school more than anything else. (Of course, worrying about the next Ice Age and its effects on real estate values does keep us up at night.)
Best summary I have seen of The Skeptics' Case, presented in a way that even non-scientists can easily follow.
I think of them as the nighttime version of the Marsh Hawk, because they like the wide open spaces, grasslands, fields, and marsh edges. They are not woodland birds.
I know we do not have them at the farm, because we have a hundred acres of meadow and a perfect barn loft open for them to use, and they have never used it. Plus there are hundreds more acres of horse field and cow pasture nearby. I think we're at the northern edge of their range. For owls, we have only Great Horned, Barred, and Screech as far as I know. Probably Saw-Whet in winter, but I haven't seen one there.
The last time I saw a Barn Owl was when one flew across the road in front of me at night in the headlights, between a marsh and some large estate fields in lovely Lloyd Harbor, Long Island. Lloyd Neck, actually.
Breitbart was a new media pioneer and hero. God bless him.
A comment from his family's announcement: "Andrew lived boldly, so that we more timid souls would dare to live freely and fully, and fight for the fragile liberty he showed us how to love."
From Heather MacDonald's review of The City That Become Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control, It's the Cops, Stupid!
A quote:
New York’s safety surge torpedoes all conventional understandings about crime. To be sure, the country as a whole experienced its own record-breaking crime drop in the 1990s, but New York’s crime freefall was twice as steep—80 percent, as opposed to 40 percent—and lasted twice as long. Whereas America’s crime decline stalled in the 2000s, New York’s continued, cementing Gotham’s previously unimaginable status as the safest big city in the country.
You might think that criminologists would have flocked to New York to study how such a paradigm-shattering development happened. Instead, for the last decade and a half, the criminology profession has tried to look the other way. A favorite criminological pursuit in the 1990s was finding cities that equaled New York’s crime decline on a single front—homicide, say—in order to diminish the significance of what was happening in the nation’s largest city. San Diego and Boston were favorites of New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield and his professional sources, no matter how wildly different those localities’ demographics and overall crime rates were from New York’s. When, by the late ’90s, the crime drop in the rival cities had petered out or, as in the case of Boston, reversed itself, the profession lost interest in New York entirely. The city, after all, had two counts against it: it was presided over by a crusading Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, who was targeting New York’s welfare culture as well as its violence and disorder, and all early indications suggested that responsibility for the crime decline lay with the newly focused, assertive tactics coming out of the New York Police Department.
Read the whole thing. I suspect that one reason NYC's success (and it is palpable when you visit these days) is not widely imitated in the big urban areas is because it doesn't fit Blue Social Theory. Blue Social Theory wants to deal with the "root causes of crime," when we already know the cause of crime is people - often bad people or addicts - behaving badly.
Whoever wrote President Obama’s speech at a dinner last night to honor Iraq War veterans did an excellent job of highlighting the vets’ qualities and their lessons to all Americans. (Emphasis added) However, it is praise that is election year hypocrisy:
Seems to me that downtown Nashville had a great opportunity to eliminate all zoning, and see what happened. People might actually, with freedom, provide things that people want. After all, the government, in its infinite planning wisdom, razed almost the entire historic downtown in "urban renewal," aka "urban death."
Yep. Just a question of whether free markets, or politicians, or dictators, or oligopolies control it and its movement. As a freedom-oriented person, I prefer free markets as the best representation of human interests.
In 1995, shortly after it was privatized, only 16 million people used the Internet world-wide. By 2011, more than two billion were online—and that number is growing by as much as half a million every day. This explosive growth is the direct result of governments generally keeping their hands off the Internet sphere.
Net access, especially through mobile devices, is improving the human condition more quickly—and more fundamentally—than any other technology in history. Nowhere is this more true than in the developing world, where unfettered Internet technologies are expanding economies and raising living standards.
The UN regulations sound to me like a solution in search of a problem, and that's one thing organizations excel at.
We are giving them free stuff so they don't threaten us with nukes? Is that called "foreign policy"? I term it blackmail. They have no food because of their own psychotic policies. Aid only prolongs their control.
How can it be that we have so many people in the upper reaches of government who seem to have nary a clue about what America is all about?
Steyn put it well when he wrote about Your Right to Compulsory Education. I suppose we have another Right - the Right to Compulsory Medical Insurance.
But back to Geithner, Lindsay says what I wanted to say in Geithner and the 'Privilege' of Being American - The Founders argued that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were rights that preceded government—not things to be granted by it. My bolds:
... the real problem with this whole privilege argument goes back to what the Founding Fathers were thinking. Being an American is a right, not a privilege. The privilege belongs to those who are temporarily allowed to serve this great nation in a decision-making capacity. When they turn this privilege into a right to distribute government largess in ever larger quantities—and in ways, to use Jefferson's phrase, a "wise and frugal government" would not—it is those in government, and not the governed, who bear the responsibility for our budgetary problems.
The Landlord’s Tale - A member of a maligned class explains, among other things, how he keeps up the neighborhood.
One quote:
I once employed a custodian whose family was “a bunch of burglars,” according to the investigating cop. Why the cop had waited so long to tell me, I don’t know. All along, the custodian’s kids had pilfered tools and lawnmowers from me, but I couldn’t prove anything, and besides, I liked the guy. He was a hardworking “hillbilly”—his term. I was his “little bitty buddy.” His kids took the master key and broke into an apartment across the hall. Then they committed a botched burglary down the street and confessed to that, plus my break-in. My custodian had to move out. “See you in the funny papers,” he said. Six years with me—and then, so long, because his kids were crooks.
I have concluded that we can accomplish very little with convinced warmistas and probably even less with true deniers. So we just make our measurements, perfect our theories, publish our work, and hope that in time the truth will out.
"The data doesn't matter. We're not basing our recommendations on the data. We're basing them on the climate models." -Prof. Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
"The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful." -Dr David Frame, Climate modeler, Oxford University
"It doesn't matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true." -Paul Watson, Co-founder of Greenpeace
"Unless we announce disasters no one will listen." -Sir John Houghton, First chairman of the IPCC
"No matter if the science of global warming is all phony ... climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world." -Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment
As regular readers know, we tend to believe that this is all a big trumped-up boondoggle, and of no importance. Furthermore, here at Maggie's we pray for global warming.
"God has all the essential characteristics of what we mean by a “person,” in particular conscious awareness, the ability to recognize and the ability to love. In that sense he is someone who can speak and who can listen. That, I think, is what is essential about God. Nature can be marvelous. The starry heaven is stupendous. But my reaction to that remains no more than an impersonal wonder, because that, in the end, means that I am myself no more than a tiny part of an enormous machine. The real God, however, is more than that. He is not just nature, but the One who came before it and who sustains it. And the whole of God, so faith tells us, is the act of relating. That is what we mean when we say that he is a Trinity, that he is threefold. Because he is in himself a complex of relationships, he can also make other beings who are grounded in relationships and who may relate to him, because he has related them to himself."
There’s a lot to like about day-to-day live in the advanced welfare states of western Europe. They are great places to visit. But the view of life that has taken root in those same countries is problematic. It seems to go something like this: The purpose of life is to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible, and the purpose of government is to make it as easy as possible to while away the time as pleasantly as possible – The Europe Syndrome.
Rights do not come from the exercise of government power, but from the restraint of government power. Once an infrastructure is created to redistribute positive outcomes, the only true beneficiaries of that infrastructure will be the organizers and the administrators. Even that system will be built to fail because the administrations only fully benefit from the system when it does not work properly. To the extent that it works properly the administrations will always be on the lookout for more excuses to justify the expansion of their power. More groups to protect. More civil rights to safeguard. Until no one has any rights at all.
I think a connectome could be rephrased as a soul, but I am not sure what difference renaming it makes. At TED via The Age of Connectome at Cocktail Party Physics.
Sometimes, I’m amazed that I know as many decent, intelligent, law-abiding, people as I do. Because the fact is, a disturbingly large number of Americans are simply up to no good and should not be trusted anywhere near heavy machinery, sharp tools, voting booths or me.
I’ve been going to an interesting series of lectures on what is called Holocaust theology, the attempts to analyze what lessons about G-d can be drawn from the Holocaust, summed up in the question “Where’s G-d When Needed?” The learned views vary but, not having read the books, what seems missing is the question of “Where’s Mankind When Needed?”
The discussions of the question “Where’s G-d When Needed?” offers answers that draw upon centuries of theological explorations of what G-d is or what G-d intends and of in what ways we should be observant or revisionist in our religious practices.
Ultimately, however, in my view, modesty is – at the very least – required of man in presuming to understand G-d. Indeed, whether formally or spiritually religious, whether of faith or lacking faith in G-d, whether of any faith, it is, to me, more important and more knowable to try to first understand mankind. There is a truth to be had.
Over the course of quite a few visits to Italy, I have read a good deal about Italian history, art, and architecture. Much of what I learn, I eventually forget unless I use it.
It begins with Medieval, and runs through to late Renaissance in the 1600s. Tons of pictures, and very well-written in almost-scholarly detail. Rich in detail.
The authors blend history with cultural history. A great pleasure to read. And how else would you really know what you are looking at?
Breitbart's book: 
I think of them as the nighttime version of the Marsh Hawk, because they like the wide open spaces, grasslands, fields, and marsh edges. They are not woodland birds.
Over the course of quite a few visits to Italy, I have read a good deal about Italian history, art, and architecture. Much of what I learn, I eventually forget unless I use it.