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.
To see something special. To see something beyond yourself and your imaginings. To follow it wherever it leads. To always remain prepared for miracle. That is the inner music of the story of The Star. Like all stories that survive, it is the music of the heart and not of the head, and like the heart, it will endure.
What if the whole purpose of the Constitution was to limit the government? What if Congress’s enumerated powers in the Constitution no longer limited Congress, but were actually used as justification to extend Congress’s authority over every realm of human life? What if the president, meant to be an equal to Congress, has become a democratically elected, term-limited monarch? What if the president assumed everything he did was legal just because he’s the president? What if he could interrupt your regularly scheduled radio and TV programming for a special message from him? What if he could declare war on his own? What if he could read your emails and texts without a search warrant? What if he could kill you without warning?
"When taxes are too high, people go hungry. When the government is too intrusive, people lose their spirit. Act for the people's benefit. Trust them; leave them alone."
The paradox is that the welfare state, designed to improve security and dampen social conflict, now looms as an engine for insecurity, conflict and disappointment. Facing the hard questions of finding a sustainable balance between individual protections and better economic growth, the Europeans have spent years dawdling. The parallel with our situation is all too obvious.
Politicians in New Zealand are wedded to the idea of the activist state, but despite huge spending increases life is not much better for most people. Over the last decade, government has provided more social services but at such great cost that we have to question whether the marginal improvements in social outcomes justify the cost, whether there are other ways to bring about the same results, and whether such spending is fiscally responsible in the long term.
70% of the Forbes elite are self-made billionaires. Those entrepreneurial successes include not just the names behind Facebook, Google, Apple and Starbucks but also EBay (Meg Whitman, Pierre Omidyar), Yahoo (Jerry Yang), Nike (Phil Knight), AOL (Steve Case), Amazon (Jeff Bezos), Subway sandwiches (Peter Buck, Fred DeLuca), "Star Wars" (George Lucas) and even Beanie Babies (Ty Warner). Does anyone doubt that these members of the reviled 1% have enriched the country in significant ways?
Even more to the point is that all of these club-400 elites were once just like "us."
China's Hard Landing - The state-led growth model is leading the country into trouble:
China is a poster child for the Austrian school of economics' theory of the business cycle. After undertaking the biggest stimulus program the world has ever seen in response to the global financial crisis, the country is drowning in unproductive investments financed with credit.
... in the same summary the IPCC says “Projected changes in climate extremes under different emissions scenarios generally do not strongly diverge in the coming two to three decades, but these signals are relatively small compared to natural climate variability over this time frame. Even the sign (higher or lower) of projected changes in some climate extremes over this time frame is uncertain.” They are saying that up to the year 2040 the climate changes from the emissions of carbon dioxide will be so small as to be virtually undetectable from natural climate variability. This also strongly implies that any effects from global warming on extreme weather now are so small, compared with natural variability, that they are undetectable. This IPCC statement also leads to the conclusion that any claims that global warming is causing noticeable extreme weather events today is false. However, after 2040 the effects of global warming will then overwhelm nature and extreme events will be increasing due to carbon dioxide emissions. It appears the IPCC is worried about the lack of recent warming and is pushing the climate calamity farther into the future. To the general public this must send a very confusing mixed message.
This morning on the way to Sunday School, my boys complained at my classical music radio station, "There's no words." Our Maggie's Farm pinup Marianne wrote me later about a childhood experience:
I wonder whether you’ve ever heard Rosa Ponselle. She is the first opera singer I ever heard and the one who made me fall in love with singing. Caruso discovered her on “the Borscht Circuit” where she was singing duets with her sister. They called themselves “Those Italian Girls” and they simply bowled Caruso over. He arranged an audition for her with the manager of The Metropolitan Opera, and he was bowled over by the beauty of her voice and her skill in singing and immediately offered her a contract. Talk about a fairy tale! In the early 1930s, I was just a little squid, and had to take a nap every afternoon. I had smuggled my Mom’s radio into my room and one Saturday afternoon, I found the Metropolitan Opera broadcast, which absolutely astounded me. That’s when I fell in love with opera.
I went to YouTube, listening to many of Rosa Ponselle's recordings, and went to WikiPedia to learn more about her. To sum it up, Maria Callas called Ponselle, "The greatest singer of us all." The New York Times critic called her voice "vocal gold."
Here's Rosa Ponselle in one of her greatest, demonstrating her unique range:
And, as Sunday comes to a close, here's Rosa Ponselle with one of her fitting non-operatic entries:
Every day that I know Marianne is a perfect day. Including one like this when she helps me get vengeance on my boys.
For competitive college admissions, it is tough for Asians to dodge the Asian quotas by labelling themselves as "white." Goes to show how insane this preoccupation with race has become.
What race is a half-Asian? What race is an American Indian or an Eskimo? (Asian, right?) What race is Obama, who "passes" as black to his great advantage in life?
In my opinion, private colleges can do whatever they want (eg Morehouse College), but taxpayer-supported schools should be racially blind. After all, our taxes are racially blind. Ignore race and ethnicity, and just think about their potential to benefit from, and to add something to, the place.
As you go through your list of end-of-year charitable contributions, please consider adding FIRE to your annual giving list.
They do good work on a shoestring with, as I understand it, quite a lot of volunteered legal time. As I see it, FIRE is continuing the work of the Berkeley Free Speech movement of the 60s. In fact, I am considering offering myself to them for occasional free counsel.
In my view, few things in life match the pleasure of giving money for the things one cares about. The freedom to do so is a gift itself, and a privilege. Like many or most of the conservative persuasion, we like to give until it hurts, but without going into debt to do it. The widow's mite: my charitable check sizes range from $50 to $1000, depending on how I feel and where I see the needs, but I have to whittle my list down to 12-15 of my favorite charities.
The great Charles Dickens would, I am sure, be amused that his casual novelette, A Christmas Carol, would be one of his most popular works. It's a story of a cranky sinner becoming a reborn Christian, and the best testimony ever along with being one of the best movies ever made.
From covetous, cheerless insanity to joy in life, the loving "life in abundance" that we are promised. Non-Christians and atheists mght be able to get a sense of what it is all about from this film, even though it is never overtly Christ-centered.
This is somewhat edited, but contains the gist of it:
Every now and then I read some article on how the Web is running out of bandwidth, or the government is going to take it over, or the UN is going to control it, or the increase in domain extensions is going to fragmentize it, or the corporations will soon own everything, or any of a dozen scenarios that spell certain doom.
I think, if only.
Personally, I'd be delighted to see a new 'web' spring up. Personal sites only, please. Commercial ventures okay if owned by only one person.
The problem is that the Web has gotten so massive that trying to search for info is becoming exceedingly difficult. Your initial search will probably come up with millions of hits. Refine it and, if you're lucky, it'll get it down to a mere tens of thousands.
When it gets near to impossible is when you're totally lacking in semi-unique 'keywords'. I twice spent over an hour looking for a WordPress plugin that would display the 'last modified' date when listing the posts — and have it be clickable so the posts could be sorted that way (like it does with the name of the posts, author, date, etc).
And I got nowhere fast, simply because there just wasn't any keyword that helped zone in on the answer. I just now did a search for "wordpress plugin list last modified" and came up with the expected 1.2 million hits. I have Google display 20 hits per page, so, at 10 minutes per page tracking down leads per 8 hours a day, that's 3.4 years to go through them all.
If you, like me, simply don't have the 3.4 years available to do a proper Google search, there are some nifty little tricks that can help out immensely.
This past weekend, my elder son asked me to drive him to the outlets so he could get some Ralph Lauren shirts at a reduced cost. Frankly, I don't know where he got this penchant for name brand clothing, but it's his money, not mine. What is my money is the gas it takes to drive an hour to the outlets and the time I gave up to make the 2 hour (round trip) drive. I thought it would be a good lesson for him on 2 levels. First, I could teach him about opportunity costs by showing him why the trip was frivolous. Second, he'd get some driving practice so he could get his license in 2 weeks.
I wound up getting to fulfill my goals, he got his shirts, and we both learned a valuable lesson.
No good deed goes unpunished. In other words, Murphy was right. You can almost count on unintended consequences.
Currier and Ives' Skating in Central Park (Lots more trees there than in the 1880s but it remains rus in urba, more or less, with some of the best birding in the East in migration time as a green oasis in a sea of urbanization along the Atlantic Flyway):
Newt is right, of course. The very poor need to learn work habits as early as possible, and perhaps more so than middle class kids, who tend to be surrounded by adults who have successful work and marital habits (Newt doesn't mention the marital habits, of course)
"America's growing IQ stratification, and the resulting class war that the clever are waging upon the clueless, is one of the great unmentionables." The subsequent subprime disaster exemplified this.
The Democratic Party has been hijacked by the grifters, con men, and hustlers who should be behind bars rather than behind the Justice Department, the EPA, the National Labor Relations Board, or countless other useless, worthless agencies which serve no purpose and have long overstayed their usefulness.
Leading this pack of these charlatans is its leader, Barack Hussein Obama aka Barry Soetero. If Obama is not the killer of American greatness, he is most certainly its weapon of choice.
Ouch. I think plenty of Dems are beginning to realize this now.
If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees, if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: "I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!" If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades, Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?
Dr. Williams, a college pal of Ezra Pound at Penn, practiced medicine in Rutherford, NJ until 1951 and delivered over 3000 babies. An optimistic and humane man and poet.
I know it's been said by many people many times, but I'll say it again: Sometimes, cameras do not record things - they create them. Reader reminded me of the Palliwood video below, which reminded me of OWS: would those people have been there without the nightly TV cameras, and all the attention from all the people walking by taking their pictures? I doubt it.
Thus the thousands of mostly cheerful people who swarmed into Macy's on Thanksgiving weekend to enjoy giving up their hard-earned money to evil corporations were not a meaningful meme, but thirty scruffy malcontents still at Zuccotti Park got their daily TV notoriety, maintaining the deeply meaning meme. The former activity does not require the presence of cameras, the latter does and therefore is Palliwood.
Greedy for visual content, those with the cameras create the news. Then they create the narrative to go along with it. Yes, we all know this already.
It's the festive time of year here in the USA. Saturnalia, as I term it - with Advent and the baby Jesus squeezed in there somewhere, out in the barn with the animals, or in our hearts.
Too much festivity packed into too short of a time. Party-hopping, dining out after cocktail parties and open-houses, eating too much tasty stuff, drinking too much, and seeing too many friends, old and new, to do them justice. The whirlwind already began this week, for us. I love it, but it also fatigues me. Even ran into an old prep school classmate at a large party last night, a guy I hadn't seen in around 5 years. "Hey, you look great," I said (lying). "So do you" he said (liar). "Let's go shooting sometime" he said (liar). "Great, love to" I replied (truthfully).
Here's one cool trick to save hassle for your holiday dining reservations: Open Table.com.
I love the old phrase: "We have the answer. Now what was the question again?"
It's the corollary to "For a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail."
Re my post yesterday, I still cannot understand why a jelly shop needs to be licensed and regulated. Haven't farmers been selling jams, jellies, and pies to happy customers for hundreds of years?
Lengthy and complex regulations are employment schemes for government employees and lawyers as much as anything else. Forget state regs -there are 86,000 pages in the Fed Register. Nobody knows what is in there, but it you violate one of them, you can be screwed.
Gotta love those headline writers. "Jobless Rate Falls" will be standard fare for the next week as the MSM continues its cheerleading to promote Obama's campaign. I'm not opposed to cheerleading if it makes sense. But we've heard all this before! It's a broken record.
More workers and lower unemployment are always good. But lying about their meaning is a huge problem. We don't have a hiring trend, let alone a trend meaningful enough to call for an economic recovery!
While part of the decline in the unemployment rate from 9.0 percent in October was due to people leaving the labor force, the household survey from which the jobless rate is derived also showed solid gains in employment.
In other words, about 3/4 of the drop in unemployment is from people leaving the workforce, while the long term trend since January 2011 is flat (at best). In addition, the size of the job gains are still minimal, don't represent a meaningful trend, and come as we gear up for - what? - holiday season. This is a snoozer from the MSM, but if it begins to show strength into 2012 (if we see 200,000+ jobs created in December, Jan, Feb), I'll happily eat crow. But we've seen growth of 122,000 jobs before during the recession. In fact, we've seen months of more than 200,000 several times. At what point does this story get old?
From Vanderleun,
Hot on Trail of ‘
How to Make Beer: Our Family Discovers 
Danse Russe
It's the festive time of year here in the USA. Saturnalia, as I term it - with Advent and the baby Jesus squeezed in there somewhere, out in the barn with the animals, or in our hearts.
I love the old phrase: "We have the answer. Now what was the question again?"