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.
Some Maggie's Farm readers have the feeling that Federal government in the US has been a gigantic sponge of money and power for over 100 years, to the point that we view Washington, DC almost like an imperial city (albeit with the consent of the governed), with an arrogant subculture which is oblivious to the views of huge regions of the country.
People nowadays clearly look to the Feds to meet their wants and to supply their needs far more than to their states or localities. However, the further governance is from the people they serve, the less responsive it is to the views of states and localities. Thus, for example, people in South Carolina feel somewhat disenfranchised when the Feds attempt to interfere with their Right To Work local opinions.
In the process, the Federal government has nurtured and fertilized gigantic constituencies with financial and/or power stakes in every detail of everything it undertakes. This is quite convenient for the constituencies - one-stop shopping instead of bothering with all of those messy states with their knuckle-dragging realtor and liquor store-owner legislatures and their back-woods governors.
Power and authority, unlike money and wealth, is a zero-sum game. Any authority or power which accrues centrally is lost by the individual, the localities, and the states (see Obamacare).
So, to get to today's poll question, if you were King For A Day, which Federal departments and agencies would you abolish to return the responsibilities, powers, monies,and choices to the individual, the localities, or to the states?
I'll start it off: The US Department of Education (what the heck does the federal government have to do with education, which is/was a local matter? We remember why - Jimmy Carter promised to create it to get the support of the teachers' union. Has American education improved since then? I'd say it has gotten worse as the power has moved from the PTA and local school boards, to Washington.)
My second candidate: Fannie Mae (this quasi-governmental, highly political agency threw a giant wrench into the gears of the world economy. Many predicted what would happen, but nobody cared.)
“The budget must be balanced, the Treasury must be refilled, public debt must be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom must be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands must be curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.”
Cicero, 55 B.C., as quoted by Bruce here yesterday
Our ignorance is truly staggering. According to some estimates, 95 percent of organisms in the soil alone are unknown to science. Many of them labor unseen, in the dark, serving as the churning stomachs of our planet, digesting dead plants and animals and, in the process, enriching the earth we depend upon for food and fiber. Other organisms expel their gaseous waste — a precious resource known as oxygen —to create the atmosphere that supports and sweetens the earth with such glorious creatures as toucans and manta rays and blue morpho butterflies, not to mention writers and academics. Some bacteria are even thought to contribute to the formation of clouds.
And from New Scientist, A field guide to bullshit: How do people defend their beliefs in bizarre conspiracy theories or the power of crystals? Philosopher Stephen Law has tips for spotting their strategies -
Psychoanalytic theorists have been struggling with trauma theory since Freud first abandoned it when he realized that fantasy can have as large an impact on a person as can real things. He more or less discovered the realm of what we shrinks call "psychic reality."
My take on it all is that dramatic events of all sorts affect people, but that the impact depends on their pre-existing character structure. One person's horror can be another person's excitement.
I have never been able to understand most of that "self-psychology" stuff he talks about, but I do know that everybody is born defective in some ways, and that emotionally-traumatic events or circumstances, generally unavoidable if you live long enough, change people in all sorts of ways. Sometimes they are opportunities for growth and maturation, sometimes they are simply destructive. Often, the destruction leaves a permanent scar, if not an open wound.
One of best-kept secrets in college admissions this coming year is that many top state universities will be admitting more out-of-state applicants than they ever have.
This opens up a whole new group of schools that were formerly much more difficult to get into. We’re talking about great schools , sometimes lots more openings, and for a few campuses, slightly easier academic standards!
Perhaps the 21st century will "belong to China and India", as many suggest. But the US has been written off many times before. The global industries that have done well in the past decade - particularly those in the digital economy - seem to reward risk-takers, iconoclasts and creative thinkers. For better or worse, the US is better known for those qualities than the likes of China or Germany.
However, CAP alone receives $25 million per annum, so in just two years it is in receipt of far more money than all of the “Islamophobic” groups it collectively names and condemns have made in a decade. As a 501 (3)(c) organization, CAP’s existence seems to be entirely connected to attempting to swing elections in the Democrat Party’s favor, which would appear to be a contravention of IRS guidelines.
The “originality” of claiming there is lucrative money to be made from confronting Islamism is already a stale cliché.
Being a lifelong critic of Islam, red flags popped up in my head at his purported cozy relationship with Islam and prompted me to look very closely at the governor’s record on this particular issue and at this specific time….Unless someone can come up with solid evidence to the contrary, I feel relieved that Governor Perry is not an Islamophile, he is not even an Islamic apologist, and he can be entrusted with the responsibility of guarding our nation’s priceless heritage of liberty against the assaults of Islamic fascism.
Liberal elites like Keller are haunted by the specter of right-wing theocracy. When they see Christian conservatives on the campaign trail, they envision inquisitions and witch hunts and the suppression of liberty. They dread the prospect of a president respecting any "authority higher than the Constitution," and regard ardent religious faith as the equivalent of belief in space aliens.
“We can be saved only by fighting,” Hitler told leaders of the armed forces in February of 1933. Normal rules of diplomacy saw as their ultimate aim the avoidance of conflict and the settlement of international disputes by negotiation. Hitler did not play by these rules, though he repeatedly tried to publicly reassure people that he intended to do so. It took other European statesmen a very long time to realize this. Their misjudgments form the heart of this important book.
…The best chance of success was now, before Germany’s enemies were fully prepared. And so began the greatest war in history, a war that was to last until 1945, a war in which more than 50 million people would lose their lives, a war that would end in the destruction of Germany and the collapse of the European overseas empires…
In the latest upset, four federal agencies known as the Interagency Working Group (IWG) have delivered a plan to drastically censor food advertisers with products deemed to be “too high” in sodium, sugar, or fat that cater to any viewing audience between the ages of two and 11….It’s not just Twinkies and cookies that will be affected, either. Anything deemed to have a little too much sodium or fat will be tested under the new rules, including foods whose very production requires a high sodium content (like pickles) and those that are naturally high fat (like peanuts). As Katz wrote, “Nutritional staples such as Cheerios, peanut butter, and yogurt are verboten under the proposed standards, which effectively constitute a government-regulated grocery list.”
Unions Try To Dis-invent Success for Poor Minority Students:
Only 11% of likely voters think government should invent income for the poor
President Obama doubles-down on inventing prosperity through Big Government-Big Business collusion
What have we learned about inventing prosperity in 2066 years?
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) “The budget must be balanced, the Treasury must be refilled, public debt must be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom must be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands must be curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” – Cicero, 55 B.C.
While Bastiat agrees that repairing broken windows is a good thing, encouraging the glazier's trade and income, he argues that it is quite different from the idea that breaking windows is a good thing, in that it would cause money to circulate and encourage industry in general. Why? Because a shopkeeper who spends money to fix broken windows cannot spend or invest that money on new ventures.
Finally, my intertunnel, phone, and TV service has mysteriously returned via the mysterious and fragile workings of Optimum. This came in from a friend:
After the Japanese decimated our fleet in Pearl Harbor Dec 7, 1941, they could have sent their troop ships and carriers directly to California to finish what they started. The prediction from our Chief of Staff was we would notbe able to stop a massive invasion until they reached the Mississippi River. Remember, we had a 2 million man army and war shipsall fighting the Germans.
So, why did they not invade?
After the war, the remaining Japanese generals and admirals wereasked that question. Their answer|...they know that almost everyhome had guns and the Americans knew how to use them.
The world's largest army... America's hunters! I had never thought about this. A blogger added up the deer license sales in just a handful of states and arrived at a striking conclusion: There were over 600,000 hunters this season in the state of Wisconsin. Allow me to restate that number. Over the last several months, Wisconsin 's hunters became the eighth largest army in the world. More men under arms than in Iran ..More than in France and Germany combined. These men deployed to the woods of a single American stateto hunt with firearms, and no one was killed. That number pales in comparison to the 750,000 who hunted the woods of Pennsylvania and Michigan 's 700,000 hunters, all of whom have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia and itliterally establishes the fact that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.
The point? America will forever be safe from foreign invasion with that kind of home-grown firepower. Hunting -- it's not just a way to fill the freezer. It's a matter of national security.
I took a few photos at the farm in the Berkshires. Last year, a nor'easter took out our foot bridge over the stream. This week, the storm destroyed the big tractor bridge, steel I-beams, cement posts, and all. This is not good at all.
We saw this big male Eastern Box Turtle in the woods on the edge of the field, near the beaver marsh. My favorite reptile except for maybe the Black Snake, even though this was a cranky old guy:
Re flooding and our government-subsidized flood insurance, here's what I have been hearing on the radio from upstate NY and from Vermont:
Men:Why should the taxpayer subsidize anybody for living in a flood zone, even if it's only 100-year floods? Actuaries can easily cost it out. If you live near water and not on a hill, you will inevitably get flooded. Duh. Why should your calculated risk and choice be my problem? All it does is to promote building in the wrong places - and insulate people from reality - on my nickel.
Women:These people have lost so much. It's not their fault that they lived where they could get flooded. The government has to help them out and help them rebuild their homes and their lives. It's compassionate.
Obama Not Ready For Prime time : "Obama looks small. It was a juvenile move for a President to make and it shows he has a poor understanding of how to use the power of the presidency." + TV Speech by a Zombie:
In the last 2 1/2 years, we’ve had over 200 presidential talks about jobs, and now there’s going to be yet another one. It’s not just an ordinary one, but another giant showpiece, a speech to a joint session of Congress, and coincidentally at the same time as a previously scheduled GOP presidential debate. Congress is probably going to be told, as it has been over the last 2 1/2 years, that failure to enact this, that, or the other thing is irresponsible and inexcusable. But according to reports, there’s nothing new in the speech, certainly nothing that could be effective. Moreover, this latest rehash of same-old, same-old comes from a guy with support from Independents in the 30′s and whom over one in four Democrats want replaced as the top of the 2012 ticket. Even with the media carrying this guy’s water, we can’t see how this is anything other than a formula for electoral catastrophe. If you disagree, educate us please.
This “In” button will be distributed to all those who view his speech:
Zombie capitalism: No, You Can't Invest Like Warren Buffett: His Bank of America deal is a bargain no ordinary investor could get.
Zombie Terrorism: Abdul Hakiim converted to Islam, wore long robes, dreamed of paradise; He was arrested in July for trying to enter Britain with bomb-making guides and al-Qaida propaganda. "But his motivations remain a mystery"
Zombie Riot at amusement park over 'no hijab' rule
Zombie Love: The Rashid Khalidi whose tape with Barack Obama the Los Angeles Times refuses to release, has this to say about fellow zombie Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. going on a trip to Israel.
So, the vice president goes to China—and if that sounds like the beginning of a bad comedy routine, it’s because our current vice president has made it one. The man is a walking pratfall, a clown of the tongue-tied, stumbling kind, and only the media’s determined effort to shield the Obama administration from laughter has kept Joe Biden’s miscues, misunderstandings, and mispronouncements from becoming our long-running national joke.
[In] the state of Texas, we’ve created an economy here that leads the nation in job creation…What’s dumb is to oversee an economy that has lost that many millions of jobs, to put unemployment numbers over his four years will stay probably at 9 percent, to downgrade the credit of this good country, to put fiscal policies in place that were a disaster in the ‘30s and try them again in the 2000s – that’s what I consider to be the definition of dumb.
Thanks to the librarian at Bird Dog’s local library he is able to send us brief messages from the only computer working in town. Also, thanks to the local librarian, the line is long to use the computer, as middle-aged men dawdle to ogle. So, here again are some links for your evening perusal.
"The one common theme throughout these cases is that they were decided in favor of keeping the unions in power and blocking the ability of employees to challenge whether or not the unions still enjoy majority status," U.S. Chamber of Commerce Senior Vice President of Labor Randel Johnson said in an email.
That tropical storm up here dumped the river into my pool, filled it with mud, plants, and frogs, and knocked down a fence. I think VT got the worst of it all.
What books are you reading right now?
No cheating. Don't tell us that you are reading Kant.
I am reading the new Mark Twain autobiography, but you cannot really read it. You just dip into it. He was a charming fellow.
Reno at First Things looked at the life of Moses from an interesting angle: the multicultural man turned uni-cultural by the hand of God. A quote:
Each of us must struggle to understand how to live our lives in a pluralistic, democratic society. But to my mind, however fuzzy and uncertain we might be about any particular public policy or social project, we must at least be clear about Moses. We should want to follow his trajectory, and there can be no compromise with those who prize his multicultural youth. For he who is not a servant of a cultural authority deeply installed is merely human�which is to say, a slave to his passions and servant of his self-interest, who, when he comes to realize his base existence, is all too easily victim of thin, ideological deities who promise the immediate psychological satisfactions of a veneer of moral idealism.
Still without phone, intertunnel, and TV (but who needs TV?). Posting this memo from a very crowded library - nobody around here has intertunnel connections this week. Even the cell towers got screwed up, somehow.
I appreciate everybody's pitching in to keep our Maggie's "product" coming. All I can really do is to recycle old items, due to the lines here at the library machines.
This "miracle material" is simply a one atom thick flake of graphite, but at this nanoscale, graphite takes on exciting properties. Graphene is the strongest material, 200 times stronger than steel, and it is incredibly conductive. It is also very thin. Three million sheets of graphene stacked is just one millimeter high. These properties make graphene highly suited for use in the manufacture of electronic devices
…this survey suggests that extremists make up only a small percentage of American Muslims, but still make up a sufficient number that other American Muslims are worried about them.
We used to think that information is power and that the personal computer enabled lives. But, according to Jaron Lanier, things changed about ten years ago. He cites Apple, Google, and Walmart as some of the reasons….
... "The Apple idea is that instead of the personal computer model where people own their own information, and everybody can be a creator as well as a consumer, we're moving towards this iPad, iPhone model where it's not as adequate for media creation as the real media creation tools, and even though you can become a seller over the network, you have to pass through Apple's gate to accept what you do, and your chances of doing well are very small, and it's not a person to person thing, it's a business through a hub, through Apple to others, and it doesn't create a middle class, it creates a new kind of upper class. ... Google has done something that might even be more destructive of the middle class, which is they've said, "Well, since Moore's law makes computation really cheap, let's just give away the computation, but keep the data." And that's a disaster….
... What Wal-Mart recognized is that information is power, and by using network information, you could consolidate extraordinary power, and so have information about what could be made where, when, what could be moved where, when, who would buy what, when for how much? By coalescing all of that, and reducing the unknowns, they were able to globalize their point of view so they were no longer a local player, but they essentially became their own market, and that's what information can do. The use of networks can turn you from a local player in a larger system into your own global system.
... It can become such a bizarre system. What you have now is a system in which the Internet user becomes the product that is being sold to others, and what the product is, is the ability to be manipulated. It's an anti-liberty system, and I know that the rhetoric around it is very contrary to that.
How will parents react when they find out they will be expected to provide workers' compensation benefits, rest and meal breaks and paid vacation time for…babysitters? Dinner and a movie night may soon become much more complicated.
Assembly Bill 889 (authored by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, will require these protections for all “domestic employees,” including nannies, housekeepers and caregivers.
The bill has already passed the Assembly and is quickly moving through the Senate with blanket support from the Democrat members that control both houses of the Legislature – and without the support of a single Republican member. Assuming the bill will easily clear its last couple of legislative hurdles, AB 889 will soon be on its way to the Governor's desk.
Under AB 889, household “employers” (aka “parents”) who hire a babysitter on a Friday night will be legally obligated to pay at least minimum wage to any sitter over the age of 18 (unless it is a family member), provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to workers' compensation coverage, overtime pay, and a meticulously calculated timecard/paycheck….
Unfortunately, the unreasonable costs and risks contained in this bill will discourage folks from hiring housekeepers, nannies and babysitters and increase the use of institutionalized care rather than allowing children, the sick or elderly to be cared for in their homes. I can't help but wonder if that is the goal of AB 889 – a terrible bill that needs to be stopped.
He was imprisoned November 11, 1942 in German-occupied Poland in Stalag Luft III, of "The Great Escape" fame.Sconiers is the only American yet unrecovered from Stalag Luft III.
If the President’s intention was to win veterans’ votes today in his speech to the American Legion Convention, he failed miserably if the opinions I asked for from attendees are at all representative of veterans who heard the speech. The most common response when I asked folks gathered around the ashtrays and in the hallways after the speech what they thought of it was “He said everything we wanted to hear” but they aren’t convinced that the rhetoric matches the President’s intent.
Get ready for Friday afternoon. You can be sure that the Obama administration will release some bad news that can get lost or overlooked on the Labor Day weekend.
We calculate the present value of state employee pension liabilities using discount rates that reflect the risk of the payments from a taxpayer perspective. If benefits have the same default and recovery characteristics as state general obligation debt, the national total of promised liabilities based on current salary and service is $3.20 trillion. If pensions have higher priority than state debt, the value of liabilities is much larger. Using zero-coupon Treasury yields, which are default-free but contain other priced risks, promised liabilities are $4.43 trillion. Liabilities are even larger under broader concepts that account for salary growth and future service.
…the indictments have not provoked a political earthquake against Hezbollah, as many were hoping, especially as Lebanon's first deadline to apprehend the suspects passed without any substantial repercussion….At the moment, Hezbollah—in addition to its military strength—maintains a solid grip on the Lebanese political system and retains its ability to marginalize the political forces that had been behind the “Cedar Revolution” and the creation of the tribunal.
Wow. I should lose power and intertunnel more often. Great stuff below! Lots of it.
Reno at First Things looked at the life of Moses from an interesting angle: the multicultural man turned uni-cultural by the hand of God. A quote:
